(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS Summit New York 2022. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I am thrilled to be joined by Ramkumar Pandurangan. He is Practice Leader of the Cloud Advisory and Consulting Organization at Kyndryl. Ram, welcome. >> Thanks for having me, David, it's a pleasure. >> First time on theCUBE I believe. >> Ah, yes it is, so a little excited, and anxious as well, but it's great to be here. >> Fantastic. Well, when we're done, you'll be a CUBE alumni, which is actually a very distinguished badge of honor to have so. So, let's get started. Tell me about Kyndryl. I'm particularly interested in a bit of the history, how did Kyndryl come about? >> Yeah, so -- >> And what do you do now? >> I'm sorry. Before we talk about who we are and what we do, let me talk about Kyndryl's, philosophy, right? Basically so, people don't buy the cloud, people buy outcomes, and with this explosive growth in the market, as well as the complexity in which the technology has evolved, it's very challenging for everybody to find the right partner, as well as who to go to deliver it for them. And we do understand that technology is supposed to help drive your business capabilities, but not hinder. So, Kyndryl's primary philosophy is to how we can help enable our clients get the business capabilities using technology. So, having said that, we are a spinoff from IBM in 2021, and we have a strong base of 90,000 skilled professionals across a hundred countries. And, you know, we have almost 75 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies, and we almost cater half of the Fortune 500 companies, just to give you a background. And we have people across applications, data, AI, you know, network, edge, security and resiliency across the globe, but of course, cloud. >> So, do you work with partners from a cloud perspective? What does that look like? >> We have a whole broad ecosystem of partners, and, you know, anywhere from all the hyper scalers, to all the large product companies. And we understand that with a combined force of our years of experience helping our clients to be successful, partnering with our partners to help drive their capabilities. And you know, let's talk about AWS. Everybody knows that AWS has been a pioneer in the public cloud, coming up with a whole catalog of services, which is there, available for anybody. And I would like to call them as construction materials. Right? So, you could take these services, assemble them, and it could be a simple house, or it could be as big as a very complex model, kind of an environment. So, this is where we partner with AWS and bring our years of experience and help our clients go through the journey and successfully deliver in whatever complexity that they have, their existing environments. So, just an example of how we partner with our partners. >> Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. In fact, I heard someone once describe AWS as being like Home Depot, in the sense that they offer all of the bits and bytes. Of course, the AWS folks were like, "What? No, we're nothing like Home Depot!" It's like, well, you kind of are. (laughs) Because it really is important for an organization like Kyndryl to be there, to bridge the divide between the tools and the outcomes, as you mentioned. Well, what are some of the customers, or kinds of customers that you work with in this arena? >> Yeah. So, just to double click on what I said about the 75 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies, we currently manage the top five ad lanes of all ad lanes, we probably manage four of the five largest retailers, and 49% of the mobile connections are supported for the customers, and 61%, or roughly around 60% of the top 50 banks assets are managed by our service. So, we have a huge portfolio across the financial services, public sector, you know, communications, and distribution market across the globe. >> So is it fair to say that each of these customers is somewhere along the digital transformation timeline? Are they all thinking in terms of transforming digitally, what that means? Whether it's application modernization, of course, movement to cloud is part of that, does that sound like the profile of a lot of your customers? >> Exactly. So, each of them are in various, what I call in the paradigm of everybody are trying to modernize, right? Modernization is the way to go. Even though in the last three years we saw that the physical slowdown of the world, like digital transformation took an explosive growth, so everybody realized that not doing the business in a traditional way is going to get to where they want to go. And traditionally, people are cutting costs, or trying to trim down, and trying to see how they can, you know, do incremental modernization. And then they realize, especially in the last three years, that they need to holistically look at how they need to be modernizing it. Right? And that is where either it's a datacenter-driven modernization, or it's an application-centric modernization, which is moving the transformation journey. Or in general, people are holistically looking at how they can improve their overall presence in the digital world. >> So, do you think that the pandemic accelerated that? >> Absolutely. I would say that everybody started realizing how critical, and the businesses who were already a leg up in that world were quickly able to grab that opportunity, and they were able to run with that, and everybody are trying to catch up on that journey. And, you know, a lot of people who started that journey have realized that if they do not have a proper strategy to start off with, they get stuck somewhere. And that is where we can go and help them, wherever they are. >> Talk to me about some of the challenges that you see out in the field working with the actual organizations that are seeking to transform, to go through this digital transformation. What are some of the things that might surprise someone looking in from the outside? >> Again, if you go back to the basics, right, in the digital transformation world, it's not just the technology which is driving everything. People who have not clearly mapped their business objectives to the technology drivers, or the imperatives, are the ones which are, you know, feeling the pinch, that they have some technology driven transformation, but once it is done, they don't see that it's translating back to a business objective which they are trying to accomplish. That's one of the larger things which I see. So, we are trying to go back and help clients to bridge that gap, to make sure that, first, their strategy is in place, and the strategy is holistically looked at. That's one part of it. The second, larger challenge, which I'm seeing a lot of people is, they were able to quickly, you know, grapple around the technology explosion and able to start the journey, but the process and the people associated the transformation regarding those two are a lot more associated with the culture and everything else. So, it's a combination of technical resources, with not able to quickly adapt the operating model, which is the newer operating model required for the digital transformation, are the challenge which is an ongoing one. And none of this is news to anybody, but, practically, when I walk into a company, those are the areas which I continue to see where people are struggling. >> So, Kyndryl isn't solely involved with the virtual movement of workloads from one place to another, you actually work with customers to make those kinds of organizational changes and operational environment changes that need to take place. Is that right? >> Absolutely. So, as I told you, we have a whole suite of clients whom we have been supporting for decades. So, we have one set of those clients who have trusted us for years. And then we have another set of clients who we are providing some kind of services, and now we have newer clients. So between all of them, they're starting to realize that we have the end-to-end capabilities. The differentiator is, we can start from building a business case for somebody, and then strategizing it, creating a roadmap, and then actually doing the design, implement it, and help them to migrate it. And once the migration is done, continue to help optimizing it, and then not only stopping there, but the key thing where everybody have, you know, fallen behind, is how do you operate, manage it once you start migrating it. So, this is where Kyndryl is sitting in a very sweet spot, because we already are managing most of our clients, or we have the client base, they're operating theirs either holistically, or some portions of it, and now when they're trying to go on their journey we are very well suited because we already understand their environment. And while they are transforming into the cloud space, we are also able to bridge that gap by managing their existing and to manage to the cloud. So, we can, end-to-end. >> And yeah, talking about true end-to-end, you know, we're talking to you from AWS Summit New York 2022, of course, so the focus is AWS, but Kyndryl works with other hyperscale cloud partners as well. So I mean, you are primarily an advocate for the customer. Is that a fair? That's what they call in the business "a softball question." (Ramkumar and David laughing) Because if you answer, "no, we're not primarily in involved in the business of advocating for our customers," we should just stop this conversation right now. But seriously, the point is, you are truly an objective consultant in this game. >> Absolutely. Thank you for asking that, (David laughing) because we are a vendor neutral service provider. So we go, and when we walk into the client, we like to hear from the client what their challenges are. Right? Where are they trying to be? If they already started the journey, where they are. They could be anywhere from an on-premises trying to just modernize some aspects of their, you know, operational, or from the application side, or they could be anywhere in the hybrid cloud. And most of them are hybrid multicloud. So, it's not just AWS, it could be Azure, GCP, OCI, Oracle, or IBM cloud. It doesn't matter. We go and meet the client where they are. If they ask us for a point of view, we will provide them once we understand what their objectives, and their technology workloads they are having, and how they want to do it based on that we can. But if they already started journey, we are more than happy to partner with them on any of the cloud journeys. And most of them are in the hybrid multi-cloud as I said, so we are very well suited to help them. And as I said, we are not completely an agnostic service provider. >> Well, if I am an existing business that's seeking to go through digital transformation, I would recognize that there is a lot of power in this idea that you have a history in on-premises IT, going back to, you know, the sort of DNA for IBM global services. And the reason why I think that's important is because anyone can stand up a net new service with nothing existing, in one of the hyperscale clouds. It's a whole different proposition when you have decades of legacy infrastructure and processes that need to be massaged and moved over. I wonder, does Kyndryl get a lot of mileage out of that in terms of being able to say, "Hey, we understand your existing environment because we've been working in this world for decades." Or is the message more, "Hey, we are super cool cloud kids too?" How do you come down on that? Maybe that's a little bit of inside info. (Ramkumar laughing) >> No, the reality on the ground basically, David, is not everybody can move all their workloads to cloud, and not all workloads are suited to go to cloud as well. So, it is us who need to make sure that we can help our clients make the right choices by doing a rationalization of their workloads, and make sure that we understand their business, their end clients whom they're servicing, their capabilities, and then based on that, we can help them to do both, right? Whether it's just on-premises modernization, or help them to take them in a hybrid cloud mode. So the answer is both, right? Even though we currently manage their environment, doesn't mean that we need to continue to support, but, you know, we are moving up the stack to help them, to support them in their hybrid cloud journey as well. And not only that, this gives us a capability or an ability to help them in a much more holistic way by looking at their full ops, right? That's a huge area where people are trying to go into the cloud, or they already started to go into the cloud, but how do they optimize their environment? Right? These are the areas where, and then if you want to modernize some of their operating model, right, how do we deploy the SRE, or the DevSecOps, or the DevOps? So, we kind of look up all those aspects as people are trying to move into the cloud aspect so we can help them both on-premises, or if they want to modernize much more we can do it in the hybrid cloud as well. I don't know whether that fully answered your question. >> Absolutely, it does. In fact, Ram, what you and Kyndryl are doing is what we at theCUBE refer to as having adult conversations about cloud with the clients that you serve. With that, looks like we are at the end of our time together. I really appreciate the chance to hear about what you're doing, and to hear all about Kyndryl. From me, Dave Nicholson, at theCUBE, I'd like to say, stay tuned for a continuing coverage of AWS Summit New York 2022, and always stay tuned to theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)

(calm electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here live in New York City for AWS Summit 2022. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, but a great conversation here as the day winds down. First of all, 10,000 plus people, this is a big event, just New York City. So sign of the times that some headwinds are happening? I don't think so, not in the cloud enterprise innovation game. Lot going on, this innovation conversation we're going to have now is about the confluence of cloud scale integration data and the future of how FinTech and other markets are going to change with technology. We got Chris Thomas, the CTO of Slalom, and Rob Krugman, chief digital officer at Broadridge. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we had a talk before we came on camera about your firm, what you guys do, take a quick minute to just give the scope and size of your firm and what you guys work on. >> Yeah, so Broadridge is a global financial FinTech company. We work on, part of our business is capital markets and wealth, and that's about a third of our business, about $7 trillion a day clearing through our platforms. And then the other side of our business is communications where we help all different types of organizations communicate with their shareholders, communicate with their customers across a variety of different digital channels and capabilities. >> Yeah, and Slalom, give a quick one minute on Slalom. I know you guys, but for the folks that don't know you. >> Yeah, no problem. So Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation. And me personally, I'm part of the element lab, which is focused on forward thinking technology and disruptive technology in the next five to 10 years. >> Awesome, and that's the scope of this conversation. The next five to 10 years, you guys are working on a project together, you're kind of customer partners. You're building something. What are you guys working on? I can't wait to jump into it, explain. >> Sure, so similar to Chris, at Broadridge, we've created innovation capability, innovation incubation capability, and one of the first areas we're experimenting in is digital assets. So what we're looking to do is we're looking at a variety of different areas where we think consolidation network effects that we could bring can add a significant amount of value. And so the area we're working on is this concept of a wallet of wallets. How do we actually consolidate assets that are held across a variety of different wallets, maybe traditional locations- >> Digital wallets. >> Digital wallets, but maybe even traditional accounts, bring that together and then give control back to the consumer of who they want to share that information with, how they want their transactions to be able to control. So the idea of, people talk about Web 3 being the internet of value. I often think about it as the internet of control. How do you return control back to the individual so that they can make decisions about how and who has access to their information and assets? >> It's interesting, I totally like the value angle, but your point is what's the chicken and the egg here, the cart before the horse, you can look at it both ways and say, okay, control is going to drive the value. This is an interesting nuance, right? >> Yes, absolutely. >> So in this architectural world, they thought about the data plane and the control plane. Everyone's trying to go old school, middleware thinking. Let's own the data plane, we'll win everything. Not going to happen if it goes decentralized, right, Chris? >> Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're building a decentralized application, but it really is built on top of AWS. We have a serverless architecture that scales as our business scales built on top of things like S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, and of course using those security principles like Cognito and AWS Gateway, API Gateway. So we're really building an architecture of Web 3 on top of the Web 2 basics in the cloud. >> I mean, all evolutions are abstractions on top of each other, IG, DNS, Key, it goes the whole nine yards. In digital, at least, that's the way. Question about serverless real quick. I saw that Redshift just launched general availability of serverless in Redshift? >> Yes. >> You're starting to see the serverless now part of almost all the services in AWS. Is that enabling that abstraction, because most people don't see it that way. They go, oh, well, Amazon's not Web 3. They got databases, you could use that stuff. So how do you connect the dots and cross the bridge to the future with the idea that I might not think Web 2 or cloud is Web 3? >> I'll jump in quick. I mean, I think it's the decentralize. If you think about decentralization. serverless and decentralization, you could argue are the same way of, they're saying the same thing in different ways. One is thinking about it from a technology perspective. One is thinking about it from an ecosystem perspective and how things come together. You need serverless components that can talk to each other and communicate with each other to actually really reach the promise of what Web 3 is supposed to be. >> So digital bits or digital assets, I call it digital bits, 'cause I think zero ones. If you digitize everything and everything has value or now control drives the value. I could be a soccer team. I have apparel, I have value in my logos, I have photos, I have CUBE videos. I mean some say that this should be an NFT. Yeah, right, maybe, but digital assets have to be protected, but owned. So ownership drives it too, right? >> Absolutely. >> So how does that fit in, how do you explain that? 'Cause I'm trying to tie the dots here, connect the dots and tie it together. What do I get if I go down this road that you guys are building? >> So I think one of the challenges of digital assets right now is that it's a closed community. And I think the people that play in it, they're really into it. And so you look at things like NFTs and you look at some of the other activities that are happening and there are certain naysayers that look at it and say, this stuff is not based upon value. It's a bunch of artwork, it can't be worth this. Well, how about we do a time out there and we actually look at the underlying technology that's supporting this, the blockchain, and the potential ramifications of that across the entire financial ecosystem, and frankly, all different types of ecosystems of having this immutable record, where information gets stored and gets sent and the ability to go back to it at all times, that's where the real power is. So I think we're starting to see. We've hit a bit of a hiccup, if you will, in the cryptocurrencies. They're going to continue to be there. They won't all be there. A lot of them will probably disappear, but they'll be a finite number. >> What percentage of stuff do you think is vapor BS? If you had to pick an order of magnitude number. >> (laughs) I would say at least 75% of it. (John laughs) >> I mean, there's quite a few projects that are failing right now, but it's interesting in that in the crypto markets, they're failing gracefully. Because it's on the blockchain and it's all very transparent. Things are checked, you know immediately which companies are insolvent and which opportunities are still working. So it's very, very interesting in my opinion. >> Well, and I think the ones that don't have valid premises are the ones that are failing. Like Terra and some of these other ones, if you actually really looked at it, the entire industry knew these things were no good. But then you look at stable coins. And you look at what's going on with CBDCs. These are backed by real underlying assets that people can be comfortable with. And there's not a question of, is this going to happen? The question is, how quickly is it going to happen and how quickly are we going to be using digital currencies? >> It's interesting, we always talk about software, software as money now, money is software and gold and oil's moving over to that crypto. How do you guys see software? 'Cause we were just arguing in the queue, Dave Vellante and I, before you guys came on that the software industry pretty much does not exist anymore, it's open source. So everything's open source as an industry, but the value is integration, innovation. So it's not just software, it's the free. So you got to, it's integration. So how do you guys see this software driving crypto? Because it is software defined money at the end of the day. It's a token. >> No, I think that's absolutely one of the strengths of the crypto markets and the Web 3 market is it's governed by software. And because of that, you can build a trust framework. Everybody knows it's on the public blockchain. Everybody's aware of the software that's driving the rules and the rules of engagement in this blockchain. And it creates that trust network that says, hey, I can transact with you even though I don't know anything about you and I don't need a middleman to tell me I can trust you. Because this software drives that trust framework. >> Lot of disruption, lot of companies go out of business as a middleman in these markets. >> Listen, the intermediaries either have to disrupt themselves or they will be disrupted. I think that's what we're going to learn here. And it's going to start in financial services, but it's going to go to a lot of different places. I think the interesting thing that's happening now is for the first time, you're starting to see the regulators start to get involved. Which is actually a really good thing for the market. Because to Chris's point, transparency is here, how do you actually present that transparency and that trust back to consumers so they feel comfortable once that problem is solved. And I think everyone in the industry welcomes it. All of a sudden you have this ecosystem that people can play in, they can build and they can start to actually create real value. >> Every structural change that I've been involved in my 30 plus year career has been around inflection points. There was always some sort of underbelly. So I'm not going to judge crypto. It's been in the market for a while, but it's a good sign there's innovation happening. So as now, clarity comes into what's real. I think you guys are talking a conversation I think is refreshing because you're saying, okay, cloud is real, Lambda, serverless, all these tools. So Web 3 is certainly real because it's a future architecture, but it's attracting the young, it's a cultural shift. And it's also cooler than boring Web 2 and cloud. So I think the cultural shift, the fact that it's got data involved, there's some disruption around middleman and intermediaries, makes it very attractive to tech geeks. You look at, I read a stat, I heard a stat from a friend in the Bay Area that 30% of Cal computer science students are dropping out and jumping into crypto. So it's attracting the technical nerds, alpha geeks. It's a cultural revolution and there's some cool stuff going on from a business model standpoint. >> There's one thing missing. The thing that's missing, it's what we're trying to work on, I think is experience. I think if you're being honest about the entire marketplace, what you would agree is that this stuff is not easy to use today, and that's got to be satisfied. You need to do something that if it's the 85 year old grandma that wants to actually participate in these markets that not only can they feel comfortable, but they actually know how to do it. You can't use these crazy tools where you use these terms. And I think the industry, as it grows up, will satisfy a lot of those issues. >> And I think this is why I want to tie back and get your reaction to this. I think that's why you guys talking about building on top of AWS is refreshing, 'cause it's not dogmatic. Well, we can't use Amazon, it's not really Web 3. Well, a database could be used when you need it. You don't need to write everything through the blockchain. Databases are a very valuable capability, you get serverless. So all these things now can work together. So what do you guys see for companies that want to be Web 3 for all the good reasons and how do they leverage cloud specifically to get there? What are some things that you guys have learned that you can point to and share, you want to start? >> Well, I think not everything has to be open and public to everybody. You're going to want to have some things that are secret. You're going to want to encrypt some things. You're going to want to put some things within your own walls. And that's where AWS really excels. I think you can have the best of both worlds. So that's my perspective on it. >> The only thing I would add to it, so my view is it's 2022. I actually was joking earlier. I think I was at the first re:Invent. And I remember walking in and this was a new industry. >> It was tiny. >> This is foundational. Like cloud is not a, I don't view like, we shouldn't be having that conversation anymore. Of course you should build this stuff on top of the cloud. Of course you should build it on top of AWS. It just makes sense. And we should, instead of worrying about those challenges, what we should be worrying about are how do we make these applications easier to use? How do we actually- >> Energy efficient. >> How do we enable the promise of what these things are going to bring, and actually make it real, because if it happens, think about traditional assets. There's projects going on globally that are looking at how do you take equity securities and actually move them to the blockchain. When that stuff happens, boom. >> And I like what you guys are doing, I saw the news out through this crypto winter, some major wallet exchanges that have been advertising are hurting. Take me through what you guys are thinking, what the vision is around the wallet of wallets. Is it to provide an experience for the user or the market industry itself? What's the target, is it both? Share the design goals for the wallet of wallets. >> My favorite thing about innovation and innovation labs is that we can experiment. So I'll go in saying we don't know what the final answer is going to be, but this is the premise that we have. In this disparate decentralized ecosystem, you need some mechanism to be able to control what's actually happening at the consumer level. So I think the key target is how do you create an experience where the consumer feels like they're in control of that value? How do they actually control the underlying assets? And then how does it actually get delivered to them? Is it something that comes from their bank, from their broker? Is it coming from an independent organization? How do they manage all of that information? And I think the last part of it are the assets. It's easy to think about cryptos and NFTs, but thinking about traditional assets, thinking about identity information and healthcare records, all of that stuff is going to become part of this ecosystem. And imagine being able to go someplace and saying, oh, you need my information. Well, I'm going to give it to you off my phone and I'm going to give it to you for the next 24 hours so you can use it, but after that you have no access to it. Or you're my financial advisor, here's a view of what I actually have, my underlying assets. What do you recommend I do? So I think we're going to see an evolution in the market. >> Like a data clean room. >> Yeah, but that you control. >> Yes! (laughs) >> Yes! >> I think about it very similarly as well. As my journey into the crypto market has gone through different pathways, different avenues. And I've come to a place where I'm really managing eight different wallets and it's difficult to figure exactly where all my assets are and having a tool like this will allow me to visualize and aggregate those assets and maybe even recombine them in unique ways, I think is hugely valuable. >> My biggest fear is losing my key. >> Well, and that's an experience problem that has to be solved, but let me give you, my favorite use case in this space is, 'cause NFTs, right? People are like, what does NFTs really mean? Title insurance, right? Anyone buy a house or refinance your mortgage? You go through this crazy process that costs seven or eight thousand dollars every single time you close on something to get title insurance so they could validate it. What if that title was actually sitting on the chain, you got an NFT that you put in your wallet and when it goes time to sell your house or to refinance, everything's there. Okay, I'm the owner of the house. I don't know, JP Morgan Chase has the actual mortgage. There's another lien, there's some taxes. >> It's like a link tree in the wallet. (laughs) >> Yeah, think about it, you got a smart contract. Boom, closing happens immediately. >> I think that's one of the most important things. I think people look at NFTs and they think, oh, this is art. And that's sort of how it started in the art and collectable space, but it's actually quickly moving towards utilities and tokenization and passes. And that's where I think the value is. >> And ownership and the token. >> Identity and ownership, especially. >> And the digital rights ownership and the economics behind it really have a lot of scale 'cause I appreciate the FinTech angle you are coming from because I can now see what's going on here with you. It's like, okay, we got to start somewhere. Let's start with the experience. The wallet's a tough nut to crack, 'cause that requires defacto participation in the industry as a defacto standard. So how are you guys doing there? Can you give an update and then how can people get, what's the project called and how do people get involved? >> Yeah, so we're still in the innovation, incubation stages. So we're not launching it yet. But what I will tell you is what a lot of our focus is, how do we make these transactional things that you do? How do we make it easy to pull all your assets together? How do we make it easy to move things from one location to the other location in ways that you're not using a weird cryptographic numeric value for your wallet, but you actually can use real nomenclature that you can renumber and it's easy to understand. Our expectation is that sometime in the fall, we'll actually be in a position to launch this. What we're going to do over the summer is we're going to start allowing people to play with it, get their feedback, and we're going to iterate. >> So sandbox in when, November? >> I think launch in the fall, sometime in the fall. >> Oh, this fall. >> But over the summer, what we're expecting is some type of friends and family type release where we can start to realize what people are doing and then fix the challenges, see if we're on the right track and make the appropriate corrections. >> So right now you guys are just together on this? >> Yep. >> The opening up friends and family or community is going to be controlled. >> It is, yeah. >> Yeah, as a group, I think one thing that's really important to highlight is that we're an innovation lab. We're working with Broadridge's innovation lab, that partnership across innovation labs has allowed us to move very, very quickly to build this. Actually, if you think about it, we were talking about this not too long ago and we're almost close to having an internal launch. So I think it's very rapid development. We follow a lot of the- >> There's buy-in across the board. >> Exactly, exactly, and we saw lot of very- >> So who's going to run this? A Dow, or your companies, is it going to be a separate company? >> So to be honest, we're not entirely sure yet. It's a new product that we're going to be creating. What we actually do with it. Our thought is within an innovation environment, there's three things you could do with something. You can make it a product within the existing infrastructure, you can create a new business unit or you can spin it off as something new. I do think this becomes a product within the organization based upon it's so aligned to what we do today, but we'll see. >> But you guys are financing it? >> Yes. >> As collective companies? >> Yeah, right. >> Got it, okay, cool. Well, let us know how we can help. If you guys want to do a remote in to theCUBE. I would love the mission you guys are on. I think this is the kind of work that every company should be doing in the new R and D. You got to jump in the deep end and swim as fast as possible. But I think you can do it. I think that is refreshing and that's smart. >> And you have to do it quick because this market, I think the one thing we would probably agree on is that it's moving faster than we could, every week there's something else that happens. >> Okay, so now you guys were at Consensus down in Austin when the winter hit and you've been in the business for a long time, you got to know the industries. You see where it's going. What was the big thing you guys learned, any scar tissue from the early data coming in from the collaboration? Was there some aha moments, was there some oh shoot moments? Oh, wow, I didn't think that was going to happen. Share some anecdotal stories from the experience. Good, bad, and if you want to be bold say ugly, too. >> Well, I think the first thing I want to say about the timing, it is the crypto winter, but I actually think now's a really great time to build something because everybody's continuing to build. Folks are focused on the future and that's what we are as well. In terms of some of the challenges, well, the Web 3 space is so new. And there's not a way to just go online and copy somebody else's work and rinse and repeat. We had to figure a lot of things on our own. We had to try different technologies, see which worked better and make sure that it was functioning the way we wanted it to function. Really, so it was not easy. >> They oversold that product out, that's good, like this team. >> But think about it, so the joke is that when winter is when real work happens. If you look at the companies that have not been affected by this it's the infrastructure companies and what it reminds me of, it's a little bit different, but 2001, we had the dot com bust. The entire industry blew up, but what came out of that? >> Everything that exists. >> Amazon, lots of companies grew up out of that environment. >> Everything that was promoted actually happened. >> Yes, but you know what didn't happen- >> Food delivery. >> But you know what's interesting that didn't happen- >> (laughs) Pet food, the soccer never happened. >> The whole Super Bowl, yes. (John laughs) In financial services we built on top of legacy. I think what Web 3 is doing, it's getting rid of that legacy infrastructure. And the banks are going to be involved. There's going to be new players and stuff. But what I'm seeing now is a doubling down of the infrastructure investment of saying okay, how do we actually make this stuff real so we can actually show the promise? >> One of the things I just shared, Rob, you'd appreciate this, is that the digital advertising market's changing because now banner ads and the old techniques are based on Web 2 infrastructure, basically DNS as we know it. And token problems are everywhere. Sites and silos are built because LinkedIn doesn't share information. And the sites want first party data. It's a hoarding exercise, so those practices are going to get decimated. So in comes token economics, that's going to get decimated. So you're already seeing the decline of media. And advertising, cookies are going away. >> I think it's going to change, it's going to be a flip, because I think right now you're not in control. Other people are in control. And I think with tokenomics and some of the other things that are going to happen, it gives back control to the individual. Think about it, right now you get advertising. Now you didn't say I wanted this advertising. Imagine the value of advertising when you say, you know what, I am interested in getting information about this particular type of product. The lead generation, the value of that advertising is significantly higher. >> Organic notifications. >> Yeah. >> Well, gentlemen, I'd love to follow up with you. I'm definitely going to ping in. Now I'm going to put CUBE coin back on the table. For our audience CUBE coin's coming. Really appreciate it, thanks for sharing your insights. Great conversation. >> Excellent, thank you for having us. >> Excellent, thank you so much. >> theCUBE's coverage here from New York City. I'm John Furrier, we'll be back with more live coverage to close out the day. Stay with us, we'll be right back. >> Excellent. (calm electronic music)

(digital music) >> And we're back live in New York. It's theCUBE. It's not SNL, it's better than SNL. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here with about 10,000 to 12,000 folks. (John chuckles) There is a ton of energy here. There's a ton of interest in what's going on. But one of the things that we know that AWS is really well-known for is its massive ecosystem. And one of its ecosystem partners is joining us. Please welcome Domenic Ravita, the VP of Product Marketing from SingleStore. Dominic, great to have you on the program. >> Well, thank you. Glad to be here. >> It's a nice opening, wasn't it? (Lisa and John laughing) >> I love SNL. Who doesn't? >> Right? I know. So some big news came out today. >> Yes. >> Funding. Good number. Talk to us a little bit about that before we dig in to SingleStore and what you guys are doing with AWS. >> Right, yeah. Thank you. We announced this morning our latest round, 116 million. We're really grateful to our customers and our investors and the partners and employees and making SingleStore a success to go on this journey of, really, to fulfill our mission to unify and simplify modern, real time data. >> So talk to us about SingleStore. Give us the value prop, the key differentiators, 'cause obviously customers have choice. Help us understand where you're nailing it. >> SingleStore is all about, what we like to say, the moments that matter. When you have an analytical question about what's happening in the moment, SingleStore is your best way to solve that cost-effectively. So that is for, in the case of Thorn, where they're helping to protect and save children from online trafficking or in the case of True Digital, which early in the pandemic, was a company in Southeast Asia that used anonymized phone pings to identify real time population density changes and movements across Thailand to have a proactive response. So really real time data in the moment can help to save lives quite literally. But also it does things that are just good commercially that gives you an advantage like what we do with Uber to help real time pricing and things like this. >> It's interesting this data intensity happening right now. We were talking earlier on theCUBE with another guest and we said, "Why is it happening now?" The big data has been around since the dupe days. That was hard to work with, then data lakes kicked in. But we seem to be, in the past year, everyone's now aware like, "Wow, I got a lot of data." Is it the pandemic? Now we're seeing customers understand the consequences. So how do you look at that? Because is it just timing, evolution? Are they now getting it or is the technology better? Is machine learning better? What's the forces driving the massive data growth acceleration in terms of implementing and getting stuff out, done? (chuckles) >> We think it's the confluence of a lot of those things you mentioned there. First of all, we just celebrate the 15-year anniversary of the iPhone, so that is like wallpaper now. It's just faded into our daily lives. We don't even think of that as a separate thing. So there's an expectation that we all have instant information and not just for the consumer interactions, for the business interactions. That permeates everything. I think COVID with the pandemic forced everyone, every business to try to move to digital first and so that put pressure on the digital service economy to mature even faster and to be digital first. That is what drives what we call data intensity. And more generally, the economic phenomenon is the data intensive era. It's a continuous competition and game for customers. In every moment in every location, in every dimension, the more data hat you have, the better value prop you can give. And so SingleStore is uniquely positioned to and focused on solving this problem of data intensity by bringing and unifying data together. >> What's the big customer success story? Can you share any examples that highlight that? What are some cool things that are happening that can illustrate this new, I won't say bit that's been flipped, that's been happening for a while, but can you share some cutting edge customer successes? >> It's happening across a lot of industries. So I would say first in financial services, FinTech. FinTech is always at the leading edge of these kind of technology adaptions for speeds and things like that. So we have a customer named IEX Cloud and they're focused on providing real time financial data as an API. So it's a data product, API-first. They're providing a lot of historical information on instruments and that sort of thing, as well as real time trending information. So they have customers like Seeking Alpha, for instance, who are providing real time updates on massive, massive data sets. They looked at lots of different ways to do this and there's the traditional, transactionals, LTP database and then maybe if you want to scale an API like theirs, you might have a separate end-memory cache and then yet another database for analytics. And so we bring all that together and simplify that and the benefit of simplification, but it's also this unification and lower latency. Another example is GE who basically uses us to bring together lots of financial information to provide quicker close to the end-of-month process across many different systems. >> So we think about special purpose databases, you mentioned one of the customers having those. We were in the keynote this morning where AWS is like, "We have the broadest set of special purpose databases," but you're saying the industry can't afford them anymore. Why and would it make SingleStore unique in terms of what you deliver? >> It goes back to this data intensity, in that the new business models that are coming out now are all about giving you this instant context and that's all data-driven and it's digital and it's also analytical. And so the reason that's you can't afford to do this, otherwise, is data's getting so big. Moving that data gets expensive, 'cause in the cloud you pay for every byte you store, every byte you process, every byte you move. So data movement is a cost in dollars and cents. It's a cost in time. It's also a cost in skill sets. So when you have many different specialized data sets or data-based technologies, you need skilled people to manage those. So that's why we think the industry needs to be simplified and then that's why you're seeing this unification trend across the database industry and other parts of the stack happening. With AWS, I mean, they've been a great partner of ours for years since we launched our first cloud database product and their perspective is a little bit different. They're offering choice of the specialty, 'cause many people build this way. But if you're going after real time data, you need to bring it. They also offer a SingleStore as a service on AWS. We offer it that way. It's in the AWS Marketplace. So it's easily consumable that way. >> Access to real time data is no longer a nice-to-have for any company, it's table stakes. We saw that especially in the last 20 months or so with companies that needed to pivot so quickly. What is it about SingleStore that delivers, that you talked about moments that matter? Talk about the access to real time data. How that's a differentiator as well? >> I think businesses need to be where their customers are and in the moments their customers are interacting. So that is the real time business-driver. As far as technology wise, it's not easy to do this. And you think about what makes a database fast? A major way of what makes it fast is how you store the data. And so since 2014, when we first released this, what Gartner called at the time, hybrid transaction/analytical processing or HTAP, where we brought transactional data and analytical data together. Fast forward five years to 2019, we released this innovation called Universal Storage, which does that in a single unified table type. Why that matters is because, I would say, basically cost efficiency and better speed. Again, because you pay for the storage and you pay for the movement. If you're not duplicating that data, moving it across different stores, you're going to have a better experience. >> One of the things you guys pioneered is unifying workloads. You mentioned some of the things you've done. Others are now doing it. Snowflake, Google and others. What does that mean for you guys? I mean, 'cause are they copying you? Are they trying to meet the functionality? >> I think. >> I mean, unification. I mean, people want to just store things and make it, get all the table stakes, check boxes, compliance, security and just keep coding and keep building. >> We think it's actually great 'cause they're validating what we've been seeing in the market for years. And obviously, they see that it's needed by customers. And so we welcome them to the party in terms of bringing these unified workloads together. >> Is it easy or hard? >> It's a difficult thing. We started this in 2014. And we've now have lots of production workloads on this. So we know where all the production edge cases are and that capability is also a building block towards a broader, expansive set of capabilities that we've moved onto that next phase and tomorrow actually we have an event called, The Real Time Data Revolution, excuse me, where we're announcing what's in that new product of ours. >> Is that a physical event or virtual? >> It's a virtual event. >> So we'll get the URL on the show notes, or if you know, just go to the new site. >> Absolutely. SingleStore Real Time Data Revolution, you'll find it. >> Can you tease us with the top three takeaways from Revolution tomorrow? >> So like I said, what makes a database fast? It's the storage and we completed that functionality three years ago with Universal Storage. What we're now doing for this next phase of the evolution is making enterprise features available and Workspaces is one of the foundational capabilities there. What SingleStore Workspaces does is it allows you to have this isolation of compute between your different workloads. So that's often a concern to new users to SingleStore. How can I combine transactions and analytics together? That seems like something that might be not a good thing. Well, there are multiple ways we've been doing that with resource governance, workload management. Workspaces offers another management capability and it's also flexible in that you can scale those workloads independently, or if you have a multi-tenant application, you can segment your application, your customer tenant workloads by each workspace. Another capability we're releasing is called Wasm, which is W-A-S-M, Web Assembly. This is something that's really growing in the open source community and SingleStore's contributing to that open source scene, CF project with WASI and Wasm. Where it's been mentioned mostly in the last few years has been in the browser as a more efficient way to run code in the browser. We're adapting that technology to allow you to run any language of your choice in the database and why that's important, again, it's for data movement. As data gets large in petabyte sizes, you can't move it in and out of Pandas in Python. >> Great innovation. That's real valuable. >> So we call this Code Engine with Wasm and- >> What do you call it? >> Code Engine Powered by Wasm. >> Wow. Wow. And that's open source? >> We contribute to the Wasm open source community. >> But you guys have a service that you- >> Yes. It's our implementation and our database. But Wasm allows you to have code that's portable, so any sort of runtime, which is... At release- >> You move the code, not the data. >> Exactly. >> With the compute. (chuckles) >> That's right, bring the compute to the data is what we say. >> You mentioned a whole bunch of great customer examples, GE, Uber, Thorn, you talked about IEX Cloud. When you're in customer conversations, are you dealing mostly with customers that are looking to you to help replace an existing database that was struggling from a performance perspective? Or are you working with startups who are looking to build a product on SingleStore? Is it both? >> It is a mix of both. I would say among SaaS scale up companies, their API, for instance, is their product or their SaaS application is their product. So quite literally, we're the data engine and the database powering their scale to be able to sign that next big customer or to at least sleep at night to know that it's not going to crash if they sign that next big costumer. So in those cases, we're mainly replacing a lot of databases like MySQL, Postgre, where they're typically starting, but more and more we're finding, it's free to start with SingleStore. You can run it in production for free. And in our developer community, we see a lot of customers running in that way. We have a really interesting community member who has a Minecraft server analytics that he's building based on that SingleStore free tier. In the enterprise, it's different, because there are many incumbent databases there. So it typically is a case where there is a, maybe a new product offering, they're maybe delivering a FinTech API or a new SaaS digital offering, again, to better participate in this digital service economy and they're looking for a better price performance for that real time experience in the app. That's typically the starting point, but there are replacements of traditional incumbent databases as well. >> How has the customer conversation evolved the last couple of years? As we talked about, one of the things we learned in the pandemic was access to real time data and those moments that matter isn't a nice-to-have anymore for businesses. There was that force march to digital. We saw the survivors, we're seeing the thrivers, but want to get your perspective on that. From the customers, how has the conversation evolved or elevated, escalated within an organization as every company has to be a data company? >> It really depends on their business strategy, how they are adapting or how they have adapted to this new digital first orientation and what does that mean for them in the direct interaction with their customers and partners. Often, what it means is they realize that they need to take advantage of using more data in the customer and partner interaction and when they come to those new ideas for new product introductions, they find that it's complicated and expensive to build in the old way. And if you're going to have these real time interactions, interactive applications, APIs, with all this context, you're going to have to find a better, more cost-effective approach to get that to market faster, but also not to have a big sprawling data-based technology infrastructure. We find that in those situations, we're replacing four or five different database technologies. A specialized database for key value, a specialized database for search- >> Because there's no unification before? Is that one of the reasons? >> I think it's an awareness thing. I think technology awareness takes a little bit of time, that there's a new way to do things. I think the old saying about, "Don't pave cow paths when the car..." You could build a straight road and pave it. You don't have to pave along the cow path. I think that's the natural course of technology adaption and so as more- >> And the- pandemic, too, highlighted a lot of the things, like, "Do we really need that?" (chuckles) "Who's going to service that?" >> That's right. >> So it's an awakening moment there where it's like, "Hey, let's look at what's working." >> That's right. >> Double down on it. >> Absolutely. >> What are you excited about new round of funding? We talked about, obviously, probably investments in key growth areas, but what excites you about being part of SingleStore and being a partner of AWS? >> SingleStore is super exciting. I've been in this industry a long time as an engineer and an engineering leader. At the time, we were MemSQL, came into SingleStore. And just that unification and simplification, the systems that I had built as a system engineer and helped architect did the job. They could get the speed and scale you needed to do track and trace kinds of use cases in real time, but it was a big trade off you had to make in terms of the complexity, the skill sets you needed and the cost and just hard to maintain. What excites me most about SingleStore is that it really feels like the iPhone moment for databases because it's not something you asked for, but once your friend has it and shows it to you, why would you have three different devices in your pocket with a flip phone, a calculator? (Lisa and Domenic chuckles) Remember these days? >> Yes. >> And a Blackberry pager. (all chuckling) You just suddenly- >> Or a computer. That's in there. >> That's right. So you just suddenly started using iPhone and that is sort of the moment. It feels like we're at it in the database market where there's a growing awareness and those announcements you mentioned show that others are seeing the same. >> And your point earlier about the iPhone throwing off a lot of data. So now you have data explosions at levels that unprecedented, we've never seen before and the fact that you want to have that iPhone moment, too, as a database. >> Absolutely. >> Great stuff. >> The other part of your question, what excites us about AWS. AWS has been a great partner since the beginning. I mean, when we first released our database, it was the cloud database. It was on AWS by customer demand. That's where our customers were. That's where they were building other applications. And now we have integrations with other native services like AWS Glue and we're in the Marketplace. We've expanded, that said we are a multi-cloud system. We are available in any cloud of your choice and on premise and in hybrid. So we're multi-cloud, hybrid and SaaS distribution. >> Got it. All right. >> Got it. So the event is tomorrow, Revolution. Where can folks go to register? What time does it start? >> 1:00 PM Eastern and- >> 1:00 PM. Eastern. >> Just Google SingleStore Real Time Data Revolution and you'll find it. Love for everyone to join us. >> All right. We look forward to it. Domenic, thank you so much for joining us, talking about SingleStore, the value prop, the differentiators, the validation that's happening in the market and what you guys are doing with AWS. We appreciate it. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> Our pleasure. For Domenic Ravita and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live from New York at AWS Summit 22. John and I are going to be back after a short break, so come back. (digital pulsing music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, guys and girls, welcome back to New York City. Lisa Martin and John Furrier are live with theCUBE at AWS Summit 22, here in The Big Apple. We're excited to be talking about security next. James Arlen joins us, the CISO at Aiven. James, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Absolutely, it's good to be here. >> Tell the audience a little bit about Aiven, what you guys do, what you deliver, and what some of those differentiators are. >> Oh, Aiven. Aiven is a fantastic organization. I'm actually really lucky to work there. It's a database as a service, managed databases, all open source. And we're capital S, serious about open source. So 10 different open source database products delivered as a platform, all managed services, and the game is really about being the most performant, secure, and compliant database as a service on the market, friction free for your developers. You don't need people worrying about how to run databases. You just want to be able to say, here, take care of my data for me. And that's what we do. And that's actually the differentiator. We just take care of it for you. >> Take care of it for you, I like that. >> So they download the open source. They could do it on their own. So all the different projects are out there. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> What do you guys bringing to the table? You said the managed service, can you explain that. >> Yeah, the managed service aspect of it is, really, you could install the software yourself. You can use Postgres or Apache Kafka or any one of the products that we support. Absolutely you can do it yourself. But is that really what you do for a living, or do you develop software, or do you sell a product? So we take and do the hard work of running the systems, running the equipment. We take care of backups, high availability, all the security and compliance things around access and certifications, all of those things that are logging, all of that stuff that's actually difficult to do, well and consistently, that's all we do. >> Talk about the momentum, I see you guys were founded in what? 2016? >> Yes. >> Just in May of '22, raised $210 million in series D funding. >> Yes. >> Talk about the momentum and also from your perspective, all of the massive changes in security. >> It's very interesting to work for a company where you're building more than 100% growth year over year. It's a powers of two thing. Going from one to two, not so scary, two to four, not so scary. 512 to 1024, it's getting scary. (Lisa chuckles) 1024 to 2048, oh crap! I've been with Aiven for just almost two years now, and we are less than 70 when I started, and we're near 500 now. So, explosive growth is very interesting, but it's also that, you're growing within a reasonable burn rate boundary as well. And what that does from a security perspective, is it leaves you in the position that I had. I walked in and I was the first actual CISO. I had a team of four, I now have a team of 40. Because it turns out that like a lot of things in life, as you start unpacking problems, they're kind of fractal. You unpack the problem, you're like oh, well I did deal with that problem, but now I got another problem that I got to deal with. And so there's, it's not turtles all the way down. >> There's a lot of things going on and other authors, survive change. >> And there's fundamental problems that are still not fixed. And yet we treat them like they're fixed. And so we're doing a lot of hard work to make it so that we don't have to do hard work ongoing. >> And that's the value of the managed service. >> Yes. >> Okay, so talk about competition. Obviously, we had ETR on which is Enterprise Research Firm that we trust, we like. And we were looking at the data with the headwinds in the market, looking at the different players like got Amazon has Redshift, Snowflake, and you got Azure Sequence. I think it's called one of those products. The money that's being shifted from on premise data where the old school data warehouse like terra data and whatnot, is going first to Snowflake, then to Azure, then to AWS. Yes, so that points to snowflake being kind of like the bell of the ball if you will, in terms of from a data cloud. >> Absolutely. >> How do you compete with them? What's the pitch 'Cause that seemed to be a knee-jerk reaction from the industry. 'Cause snowflake is hot. They have a good value product. They have a smart team, Databrick is out there too. >> Yeah I mean... >> how do you guys compete against all that. >> So this is that point where you're balancing the value of a specific technology, or a specific technology vendor. And am I going to be stuck with them? So I'm tying my future to their future. With open source, I'm tying my future to the common good right. The internet runs on open source. It doesn't run on anything closed. And so I'm not hitching my wagon to something that I don't control. I'm hitching it to something where, any one of our customers could decide. I'm not getting the value I need from Aiven anymore. I need to go. And we provide you with the tools necessary, to move from our open source managed service to your own. Whether you go on-prem or you run it yourself, on a cloud service provider, move your data to you because it's your data. It's not ours. How can I hold your data? It's like weird extortion ransoming thing. >> Actually speaking, I mean enterprise, it's a big land grab 'cause with cloud you're horizontally scalable. It's a beautiful thing, open source is booming. It's going in Aiven, every day it's just escalating higher and higher. >> Absolutely. >> It is the software business. So open is open. Integration and scale seems to be the competitive advantage. >> Yeah. >> Right. So, how do you guys compete with that? Because now you got open source. How do you offer the same benefits without the lock in, or what's the switching costs? How do you guys maintain that position of not saying the same thing in Snowflake? >> Because all of the biggest data users and consumers tend to give away their data products. LinkedIn gave away their data product. Uber gave away their data product, Facebook gave away their data product. And we now use those as community solutions. So, if the product works for something the scale of LinkedIn, or something the scale of Uber. It will probably work for you too. And scale is just... >> Well Facebook and LinkedIn, they gave away the product to own the data to use against you. >> But it's the product that counts because you need to be able to manipulate data the way they manipulate data, but with yours. >> So low latency needs to work. So horizontally, scalable, fees, machine learning. That's what we're seeing. How do you make that available? Customers want on architecture? What do you recommend? Control plane, data plane, how do you think about that? >> It's interesting. There's architectural reasons to think about it in terms like that. And there's other good architectural reasons to not think about it. There's sort of this dividing line in the cloud, where your cloud service provider, takes over and provides you with the opportunity to say, I don't know. And I don't care >> As long as it's secure >> As long as it's secure absolutely. But there's sort of that water line idea, where if it's below the water line, let somebody else deal. >> What is in the table stakes? 'Cause I like that approach. I think that's a good value proposition. Store it, what boxes have to be checked? Compliance, secure, what are some of the boxes? >> You need to make sure that you've taken care of all of the same basics if you are still running it. Remember you can't absolve yourself of your duty to your customer. You're still on the hook. So, you have to have backups. You have to have access control. You have to understand who's administering it, and how and what they're doing. Good logging, good comprehension there. You have to have anomaly detection, secure operations. You have to have all those compliance check boxes. Especially if you're dealing with regulated data type like PCI data or HIPAA health data or you know what there's other countries besides the United States, there's other kinds of of compliance obligations there. So you have to make sure that you've got all that taken into account. And remember that, like I said, you can't absolve yourself with those things. You can share responsibilities. But you can't walk away from that responsibility. So you still have to make sure that you validate that your vendor knows what they're talking about. >> I wanted to ask you about the cybersecurity skills gap. So I'm kind of giving a little segue here, because you mentioned you've been with Aiven for about two years. >> Almost. >> Almost two years. You've started with a team of four. You've grown at 10X in less than two years. How have you accomplished that, considering we're seeing one of the biggest skills shortages in cyber in history. >> It's amazing, you see this show up in a lot of job Ads, where they ask for 10 years of experience in something that's existed for three years. (John Furrier laughs) And it's like okay, well if I just be logical about this I can hire somebody at less than the skill level that I need today, and bring them up to that skill level. Or I can spend the same amount of time, hoping that I'll find the magical person that has that set of skills that I need. So I can solve the problem of the skills gap by up-skilling the people that I hire. Which is strangely contrary to how this thing works. >> The other thing too, is the market's evolving so fast that, that carry up and pulling someone along, or building and growing your own so to speak is workable. >> It also really helps us with a bunch of sustainability goals. It really helps with anything that has to do with diversity and inclusion, because I can bring forward people who are never given a chance. And say, you know what? You don't have that magical ticket in life, but damn you know what you're talking about? >> It's a classic pedigree. I went to this school, I studied this degree. There's no degree if have to stop a hacker using state of the art malware. (John Furrier laughs) >> Exactly. What I do today as a job, didn't exist when I was in post-secondary at all. >> So when you hire, what do you look for? I mean obviously problem solving. What's your kind of algorithm for hiring? >> Oh, that's a really interesting question. The quickest sort of summary of it is, I'm looking for not a jerk. >> Not a jerk. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Because it turns out that the quality that I can't fix in a candidate, is I can't fix whether or not they're a jerk, but I can up-skill them, I can educate them. I can teach them of a part of the world that they've not had any interaction with. But if they're not going to work with the team, if they're going to be, look at me, look at me. If they're going to not have that moment of, I have this great job, and I get to work today. And that's awesome. (Lisa Martin laughs) That's what I'm trying to hire for. >> The essence of this teamwork is fundamental. >> Collaboration. >> Cooperation. >> Curiosity. >> That's the thing yeah, absolutely. >> And everybody? >> Those things, oh absolutely. Those things are really, really hard to interview for. And they're impossible to fix after the fact. So that's where you really want to put the effort. 'Cause I can teach you how to use a computer. I mean it's hard, but it's not that hard. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Well I love the current state of data management. Good overview, you guys are in the good position. We love open source. Been covering it for, since theCUBE started. It continues to redefine more and more the industry. It is the software industry. Now there's no debate about that. If people want to have that debate, that's kind of waste of time, but there are other ways that are happening. So I have to ask you. As things are going forward with innovation. Okay, if opensource is going to be the software industry. Where's the value? >> That's a fun question wow? >> Is it going to be in the community? Is it the integration? Is it the scale? If you're open and you have low switching costs... >> Yeah so, when you look at Aiven's commitment to open source, a huge part of that is our open source project office, where we contribute back to those core products, whether it's parts of the Apache Foundation, or Postgres, or whatever. We contribute to those, because we have staff who work on those products. They don't work on our stuff. They work on those. And it's like the opposite of a zero sum game. It's more like Nash equilibrium. If you ever watch that movie, "A beautiful mind." That great idea of, you don't have to have winners and losers. You can have everybody loses a little bit but everybody wins a little bit. >> Yeah and that's the open the ethos. >> And that's where it gets tied up. >> Another follow up on that. The other thing I want to get your reaction on is that, now in this modern era of open source, almost all corporations are part of projects. I mean if you're an entrepreneur and you want to get funding it's pretty simple. You start open source project. How many stars you get on GitHub guarantees it's a series C round, pretty much. So open source now has got this new thing going on, where it's not just open source folks who believe in it It's an operating model. What's the dynamic of corporations being part of the system. It used to be, oh what's the balance between corporate and influence, now it's standard. What's your reaction? >> They can do good and they can do harm. And it really comes down to why are you in it? So if you look at the example of open search, which is one of the data products that we operate in the Aiven system. That's a collaboration between Aiven. Hey we're an awesome company, but we're nowhere near the size of AWS. And AWS where we're working together on it. And I just had this conversation with one of the attendees here, where he said, "Well AWS is going to eat your story there. "You're contributing all of this "to the open search platform. "And then AWS is going to go and sell it "and they're going to make more money." And I'm like yep, they are. And I've got staff who work for the organization, who are more fulfilled because they got to deliver something that's used by millions of people. And you think about your jobs. That moment of, (sighs) I did a cool thing today. That's got a lot of value in it. >> And part of something. >> Exactly. >> As a group. >> 100%. >> Exactly. >> And we end up with a product that's used by millions. Some of it we'll capture, because we do a better job running than the AWS does, but everybody ends up winning out of the backend. Again, everybody lost a little, but everybody also won. And that's better than that whole, you have to lose so that I can win. At zero something, that doesn't work. >> I think the silo conversations are coming, what's the balance between siloing something and why that happens. And then what's going to be freely accessible for data. Because the real time information is based upon what you can access. "Hey Siri, what's the weather. "We had a guest on earlier." It says, oh that's a data query. Well, if the weather is, the data weathers stored in a database that's out here and it can't get to the response on the app. Yeah, that's not good, but the data is available. It just didn't get delivered. >> Yeah >> Exactly. >> This is an example of what people are realizing now the consequences of this data, collateral damage or economy value. >> Yeah, and it's understanding how data fits in your environment. And I don't want to get on the accountants too hard, but the accounting organizations, AICPA and ISAE and others, they haven't really done a good job of helping you understand data as an asset, or data as a liability. I hold a lot of customer data. That's a liability to me. It's going to blow up in my face. We don't talk about the income that we get from data, Google. We don't talk about the expense of regenerating that data. We talk about, well what happens if you lose it? I don't know. And we're circling the drain around fiduciary responsibility, and we know how to do this. If you own a manufacturing plant, or if you own a fleet of vehicles you understand the fiduciary duty of managing your asset. But because we can't touch it, we don't do a good job of it. >> How far do you think are people getting into the point where they actually see that asset? Because I think it's out of sight out of mind. Now there's consequences, there's now it's public companies might have to do filings. It's not like sustainability and data. Like, wait a minute, I got to deal with these things. >> It's interesting, we got this great benefit of the move to cloud computing, and the move to utility style computing. But we took away that. I got to walk around and pet my computers. Like oh! This is my good database. I'm very proud of you. Like we're missing that piece now. And when you think about the size of data centers, we become detached from that, you don't really think about, Aiven operates tens of thousands of machines. It would take entire buildings to hold them all. You don't think about it. So how do you recreate that visceral connection to your data? Well, you need to start actually thinking about it. And you need to do some of that tokenization. When was the last time you printed something out, like you get a report and happens to me all the time with security reports. Look at a security report and it's like 150 page PDF. Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Print it out, stump it on the table in front of you. Oh, there's gravitas here. There's something here. Start thinking about those records, count them up, and then try to compare that to something in the real world. My wife is a school teacher, kindergarten to grade three, and tokenizing math is how they teach math to little kids. You want to count something? Here's 10 things, count them. Well, you've got 60,000 customer records, or you have 2 billion data points in your IOT database, tokenize that, what does 2 billion look like? What does $1 million look like in the form of $100 dollars bills on a pallet? >> Wow. >> Right. Tokenize that data, create that visceral connection with it, and then talk about it. >> So when you say tokenized, you mean like token as in decentralization token? >> No, I mean create like a totem or an icon of it. >> Okay, got it. >> A thing you can hold holy. If you're a token company. >> Not token as in Token economics and Crypto. >> If you're a mortgage company, take that customer record for one of your customers, print it out and hold the file. Like in a Manila folder, like it's 1963. Hold that file, and then say yes. And you're explaining to somebody and say yes, and we have 3 million of these. If we printed them all out, it would take up a room this size. >> It shows the scale. >> Right. >> Right. >> Exactly, create that connection back to the human level of interaction with data. How do you interact with a terabyte of data, but you do. >> Right. >> But once she hits upgrade from Google drive. (team laughs) >> What's a terabyte right? We don't hold that anymore. >> Right, right. >> Great conversation. >> Recreate that connection. Talk about data that way. >> The visceral connection with data. >> Follow up after this event. We'd love to dig more and love the approach. Love open source, love what you're doing there. That's a very unique approach. And it's also an alternative to some of the other vast growing plus your valuations are very high too. So you're not like a... You're not too far away from these big valuations. So congratulations. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah excellent, I'm sure there's lots of work to do, lots of strategic work to do with that round of funding. But also lots of opportunity, that it's going to open up, and we know you don't hire jerks. >> I don't >> You have a whole team of non jerks. That's pretty awesome. Especially 40 of 'em. That's impressive James.| >> It is. >> Congratulations to you on what you've accomplished in the course of the team. And thank you for sharing your insights with John and me today, we appreciate it. >> Awesome. >> Thanks very much, it's been great. >> Awesome, for John furrier, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCube, live in New York city at AWS Summit NYC 22, John and I will be right back with our next segment, stick around. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) (upbeat music) (crowd chattering) >> Welcome back to The City That Never Sleeps. Lisa Martin and John Furrier in New York City for AWS Summit '22 with about 10 to 12,000 of our friends. And we've got two more friends joining us here today. We're going to be talking with Haseeb Budhani, one of our alumni, co-founder and CEO of Rafay Systems, and Kevin Coleman, senior manager for Go-to Market for EKS at AWS. Guys, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Thank you very much for having us. Excited to be here. >> Isn't it great to be back at an in-person event with 10, 12,000 people? >> Yes. There are a lot of people here. This is packed. >> A lot of energy here. So, Haseeb, we've got to start with you. Your T-shirt says it all. Don't hate k8s. (Kevin giggles) Talk to us about some of the trends, from a Kubernetes perspective, that you're seeing, and then Kevin will give your follow-up. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I think the biggest trend I'm seeing on the enterprise side is that enterprises are forming platform organizations to make Kubernetes a practice across the enterprise. So it used to be that a BU would say, "I need Kubernetes. I have some DevOps engineers, let me just do this myself." And the next one would do the same, and then next one would do the same. And that's not practical, long term, for an enterprise. And this is now becoming a consolidated effort, which is, I think it's great. It speaks to the power of Kubernetes, because it's becoming so important to the enterprise. But that also puts a pressure because what the platform team has to solve for now is they have to find this fine line between automation and governance, right? I mean, the developers, you know, they don't really care about governance. Just give me stuff, I need to compute, I'm going to go. But then the platform organization has to think about, how is this going to play for the enterprise across the board? So that combination of automation and governance is where we are finding, frankly, a lot of success in making enterprise platform team successful. I think, that's a really new thing to me. It's something that's changed in the last six months, I would say, in the industry. I don't know if, Kevin, if you agree with that or not, but that's what I'm seeing. >> Yeah, definitely agree with that. We see a ton of customers in EKS who are building these new platforms using Kubernetes. The term that we hear a lot of customers use is standardization. So they've got various ways that they're deploying applications, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud and region. And they're really trying to standardize the way they deploy applications. And Kubernetes is really that compute substrate that they're standardizing on. >> Kevin, talk about the relationship with Rafay Systems that you have and why you're here together. And two, second part of that question, why is EKS kicking ass so much? (Haseeb and Kevin laughing) All right, go ahead. First one, your relationship. Second one, EKS is doing pretty well. >> Yep, yep, yep. (Lisa laughing) So yeah, we work closely with Rafay, Rafay, excuse me. A lot of joint customer wins with Haseeb and Co, so they're doing great work with EKS customers and, yeah, love the partnership there. In terms of why EKS is doing so well, a number of reasons, I think. Number one, EKS is vanilla, upstream, open-source Kubernetes. So customers want to use that open-source technology, that open-source Kubernetes, and they come to AWS to get it in a managed offering, right? Kubernetes isn't the easiest thing to self-manage. And so customers, you know, back before EKS launched, they were banging down the door at AWS for us to have a managed Kubernetes offering. And, you know, we launched EKS and there's been a ton of customer adoption since then. >> You know, Lisa, when we, theCUBE 12 years, now everyone knows we started in 2010, we used to cover a show called OpenStack. >> I remember that. >> OpenStack Summit. >> What's that now? >> And at the time, at that time, Kubernetes wasn't there. So theCUBE was present at creation. We've been to every KubeCon ever, CNCF then took it over. So we've been watching it from the beginning. >> Right. And it reminds me of the same trend we saw with MapReduce and Hadoop. Very big promise, everyone loved it, but it was hard, very difficult. And Hadoop's case, big data, it ended up becoming a data lake. Now you got Spark, or Snowflake, and Databricks, and Redshift. Here, Kubernetes has not yet been taken over. But, instead, it's being abstracted away and or managed services are emerging. 'Cause general enterprises can't hire enough Kubernetes people. >> Yep. >> They're not that many out there yet. So there's the training issue. But there's been the rise of managed services. >> Yep. >> Can you guys comment on what your thoughts are relative to that trend of hard to use, abstracting away the complexity, and, specifically, the managed services? >> Yeah, absolutely. You want to go? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, look, it's important to not kid ourselves. It is hard. (Johns laughs) But that doesn't mean it's not practical, right. When Kubernetes is done well, it's a thing of beauty. I mean, we have enough customer to scale, like, you know, it's like a, forget a hockey stick, it's a straight line up, because they just are moving so fast when they have the right platform in place. I think that the mistake that many of us make, and I've made this mistake when we started this company, was trivializing the platform aspect of Kubernetes, right. And a lot of my customers, you know, when they start, they kind of feel like, well, this is not that hard. I can bring this up and running. I just need two people. It'll be fine. And it's hard to hire, but then, I need two, then I need two more, then I need two, it's a lot, right. I think, the one thing I keep telling, like, when I talk to analysts, I say, "Look, somebody needs to write a book that says, 'Yes, it's hard, but, yes, it can be done, and here's how.'" Let's just be open about what it takes to get there, right. And, I mean, you mentioned OpenStack. I think the beauty of Kubernetes is that because it's such an open system, right, even with the managed offering, companies like Rafay can build really productive businesses on top of this Kubernetes platform because it's an open system. I think that is something that was not true with OpenStack. I've spent time with OpenStack also, I remember how it is. >> Well, Amazon had a lot to do with stalling the momentum of OpenStack, but your point about difficulty. Hadoop was always difficult to maintain and hiring against. There were no managed services and no one yet saw that value of big data yet. Here at Kubernetes, people are living a problem called, I'm scaling up. >> Yep. And so it sounds like it's a foundational challenge. The ongoing stuff sounds easier or manageable. >> Once you have the right tooling. >> Is that true? >> Yeah, no, I mean, once you have the right tooling, it's great. I think, look, I mean, you and I have talked about this before, I mean, the thesis behind Rafay is that, you know, there's like 8, 12 things that need to be done right for Kubernetes to work well, right. And my whole thesis was, I don't want my customer to buy 10, 12, 15 products. I want them to buy one platform, right. And I truly believe that, in our market, similar to what vCenter, like what VMware's vCenter did for VMs, I want to do that for Kubernetes, right. And that the reason why I say that is because, see, vCenter is not about hypervisors, right? vCenter is about hypervisor, access, networking, storage, all of the things, like multitenancy, all the things that you need to run an enterprise-grade VM environment. What is that equivalent for the Kubernetes world, right? So what we are doing at Rafay is truly building a vCenter, but for Kubernetes, like a kCenter. I've tried getting the domain. I couldn't get it. (Kevin laughs) >> Well, after the Broadcom view, you don't know what's going to happen. >> Ehh. (John laughs) >> I won't go there! >> Yeah. Yeah, let's not go there today. >> Kevin, EKS, I've heard people say to me, "Love EKS. Just add serverless, that's a home run." There's been a relationship with EKS and some of the other Amazon tools. Can you comment on what you're seeing as the most popular interactions among the services at AWS? >> Yeah, and was your comment there, add serverless? >> Add serverless with AKS at the edge- >> Yeah. >> and things are kind of interesting. >> I mean, so, one of the serverless offerings we have today is actually Fargate. So you can use Fargate, which is our serverless compute offering, or one of our serverless compute offerings with EKS. And so customers love that. Effectively, they get the beauty of EKS and the Kubernetes API but they don't have to manage nodes. So that's, you know, a good amount of adoption with Fargate as well. But then, we also have other ways that they can manage their nodes. We have managed node groups as well, in addition to self-managed nodes also. So there's a variety of options that customers can use from a compute perspective with EKS. And you'll continue to see us evolve the portfolio as well. >> Can you share, Haseeb, can you share a customer example, a joint customer example that you think really articulates the value of what Rafay and AWS are doing together? >> Yeah, absolutely. In fact, we announced a customer very recently on this very show, which is MoneyGram, which is a joint AWS and Rafay customer. Look, we have enough, you know, the thing about these massive customers is that, you know, not everybody's going to give us their logo to use. >> Right. >> But MoneyGram has been a Rafay plus EKS customer for a very, very long time. You know, at this point, I think we've earned their trust, and they've allowed us to, kind of say this publicly. But there's enough of these financial services companies who have, you know, standardized on EKS. So it's EKS first, Rafay second, right. They standardized on EKS. And then they looked around and said, "Who can help me platform EKS across my enterprise?" And we've been very lucky. We have some very large financial services, some very large healthcare companies now, who, A, EKS, B, Rafay. I'm not just saying that because my friend Kevin's here, (Lisa laughs) it's actually true. Look, EKS is a brilliant platform. It scales so well, right. I mean, people try it out, relative to other platforms, and it's just a no-brainer, it just scales. You want to build a big enterprise on the backs of a Kubernetes platform. And I'm not saying that's because I'm biased. Like EKS is really, really good. There's a reason why so many companies are choosing it over many other options in the market. >> You're doing a great job of articulating why the theme (Kevin laughs) of the New York City Summit is scale anything. >> Oh, yeah. >> There you go. >> Oh, yeah. >> I did not even know that but I'm speaking the language, right? >> You are. (John laughs) >> Yeah, absolutely. >> One of the things that we're seeing, also, I want to get your thoughts on, guys, is the app modernization trend, right? >> Yep. >> Because unlike other standards that were hard, that didn't have any benefit downstream 'cause they were too hard to get to, here, Kubernetes is feeding into real app for app developer pressure. They got to get cloud-native apps out. It's fairly new in the mainstream enterprise and a lot of hyperscalers have experience. So I'm going to ask you guys, what is the key thing that you're enabling with Kubernetes in the cloud-native apps? What is the key value? >> Yeah. >> I think, there's a bifurcation happening in the market. One is the Kubernetes Engine market, which is like EKS, AKS, GKE, right. And then there's the, you know, what, back in the day, we used to call operations and management, right. So the OAM layer for Kubernetes is where there's need, right. People are learning, right. Because, as you said before, the skill isn't there, you know, there's not enough talent available to the market. And that's the opportunity we're seeing. Because to solve for the standardization, the governance, and automation that we talked about earlier, you know, you have to solve for, okay, how do I manage my network? How do I manage my service mesh? How do I do chargebacks? What's my, you know, policy around actual Kubernetes policies? What's my blueprinting strategy? How do I do add-on management? How do I do pipelines for updates of add-ons? How do I upgrade my clusters? And we're not done yet, there's a longer list, right? This is a lot, right? >> Yeah. >> And this is what happens, right. It's just a lot. And really, the companies who understand that plethora of problems that need to be solved and build easy-to-use solutions that enterprises can consume with the right governance automation, I think they're going to be very, very successful here. >> Yeah. >> Because this is a train, right? I mean, this is happening whether, it's not us, it's happening, right? Enterprises are going to keep doing this. >> And open-source is a big driver in all of this. >> Absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> And I'll tag onto that. I mean, you talked about platform engineering earlier. Part of the point of building these platforms on top of Kubernetes is giving developers an easier way to get applications into the cloud. So building unique developer experiences that really make it easy for you, as a software developer, to take the code from your laptop, get it out of production as quickly as possible. The question is- >> So is that what you mean, does that tie your point earlier about that vertical, straight-up value once you've set up it, right? >> Yep. >> Because it's taking the burden off the developers for stopping their productivity. >> Absolutely. >> To go check in, is it configured properly? Is the supply chain software going to be there? Who's managing the services? Who's orchestrating the nodes? >> Yep. >> Is that automated, is that where you guys see the value? >> That's a lot of what we see, yeah. In terms of how these companies are building these platforms, is taking all the component pieces that Haseeb was talking about and really putting it into a cohesive whole. And then, you, as a software developer, you don't have to worry about configuring all of those things. You don't have to worry about security policy, governance, how your app is going to be exposed to the internet. >> It sounds like infrastructure is code. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> Come on, like. >> (laughs) Infrastructure's code is a big piece of it, for sure, for sure. >> Yeah, look, infrastructure's code actually- >> Infrastructure's sec is code too, the security. >> Yeah. >> Huge. >> Well, it all goes together. Like, we talk about developer self-service, right? The way we enable developer self-service is by teaching developers, here's a snippet of code that you write and you check it in and your infrastructure will just magically be created. >> Yep. >> But not automatically. It's going to go through a check, like a check through the platform team. These are the workflows that if you get them right, developers don't care, right. All developers want is I want to compute. But then all these 20 things need to happen in the back. That's what, if you nail it, right, I mean, I keep trying to kind of pitch the company, I don't want to do that today. But if you nail that, >> I'll give you a plug at the end. >> you have a good story. >> But I got to, I just have a tangent question 'cause you reminded me. There's two types of developers that have emerged, right. You have the software developer that wants infrastructures code. I just want to write my code, I don't want to stop. I want to build in shift-left for security, shift-right for data. All that's in there. >> Right. >> I'm coding away, I love coding. Then you've got the under-the-hood person. >> Yes. >> I've been to the engines. >> Certainly. >> So that's more of an SRE, data engineer, I'm wiring services together. >> Yeah. >> A lot of people are like, they don't know who they are yet. They're in college or they're transforming from an IT job. They're trying to figure out who they are. So question is, how do you tell a person that's watching, like, who am I? Like, should I be just coding? But I love the tech. Would you guys have any advice there? >> You know, I don't know if I have any guidance in terms of telling people who they are. (all laughing) I mean, I think about it in terms of a spectrum and this is what we hear from customers, is some customers want to shift as much responsibility onto the software teams to manage their infrastructure as well. And then some want to shift it all the way over to the very centralized model. And, you know, we see everything in between as well with our EKS customer base. But, yeah, I'm not sure if I have any direct guidance for people. >> Let's see, any wisdom? >> Aside from experiment. >> If you're coding more, you're a coder. If you like to play with the hardware, >> Yeah. >> or the gears. >> Look, I think it's really important for managers to understand that developers, yes, they have a job, you have to write code, right. But they also want to learn new things. It's only fair, right. >> Oh, yeah. >> So what we see is, developers want to learn. And we enable for them to understand Kubernetes in small pieces, like small steps, right. And that is really, really important because if we completely abstract things away, like Kubernetes, from them, it's not good for them, right. It's good for their careers also, right. It's good for them to learn these things. This is going to be with us for the next 15, 20 years. Everybody should learn it. But I want to learn it because I want to learn, not because this is part of my job, and that's the distinction, right. I don't want this to become my job because I want, I want to write my code. >> Do what you love. If you're more attracted to understanding how automation works, and robotics, or making things scale, you might be under-the-hood. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, look under the hood all day long. But then, in terms of, like, who keeps the lights on for the cluster, for example. >> All right, see- >> That's the job. >> He makes a lot of value. Now you know who you are. Ask these guys. (Lisa laughing) Congratulations on your success on EKS 2. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Quick, give a plug for the company. I know you guys are growing. I want to give you a minute to share to the audience a plug that's going to be, what are you guys doing? You're hiring? How many employees? Funding? Customer new wins? Take a minute to give a plug. >> Absolutely. And look, I come see, John, I think, every show you guys are doing a summit or a KubeCon, I'm here. (John laughing) And every time we come, we talk about new customers. Look, platform teams at enterprises seem to love Rafay because it helps them build that, well, Kubernetes platform that we've talked about on the show today. I think, many large enterprises on the financial service side, healthcare side, digital native side seem to have recognized that running Kubernetes at scale, or even starting with Kubernetes in the early days, getting it right with the right standards, that takes time, that takes effort. And that's where Rafay is a great partner. We provide a great SaaS offering, which you can have up and running very, very quickly. Of course, we love EKS. We work with our friends at AWS. But also works with Azure, we have enough customers in Azure. It also runs in Google. We have enough customers at Google. And it runs on-premises with OpenShift or with EKS A, right, whichever option you want to take. But in terms of that standardization and governance and automation for your developers to move fast, there's no better product in the market right now when it comes to Kubernetes platforms than Rafay. >> Kevin, while we're here, why don't you plug EKS too, come on. >> Yeah, absolutely, why not? (group laughing) So yes, of course. EKS is AWS's managed Kubernetes offering. It's the largest managed Kubernetes service in the world. We help customers who want to adopt Kubernetes and adopt it wherever they want to run Kubernetes, whether it's in region or whether it's on the edge with EKS A or running Kubernetes on Outposts and the evolving portfolio of EKS services as well. We see customers running extremely high-scale Kubernetes clusters, excuse me, and we're here to support them as well. So yeah, that's the managed Kubernetes offering. >> And I'll give the plug for theCUBE, we'll be at KubeCon in Detroit this year. (Lisa laughing) Lisa, look, we're giving a plug to everybody. Come on. >> We're plugging everybody. Well, as we get to plugs, I think, Haseeb, you have a book to write, I think, on Kubernetes. And I think you're wearing the title. >> Well, I do have a book to write, but I'm one of those people who does everything at the very end, so I will never get it right. (group laughing) So if you want to work on it with me, I have some great ideas. >> Ghostwriter. >> Sure! >> But I'm lazy. (Kevin chuckles) >> Ooh. >> So we got to figure something out. >> Somehow I doubt you're lazy. (group laughs) >> No entrepreneur's lazy, I know that. >> Right? >> You're being humble. >> He is. So Haseeb, Kevin, thank you so much for joining John and me today, >> Thank you. >> talking about what you guys are doing at Rafay with EKS, the power, why you shouldn't hate k8s. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you as well. >> Yeah, thank you very much for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate it. With John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from New York City at the AWS NYC Summit. John and I will be right back with our next guest, so stick around. (upbeat music) (gentle music)

welcome back to thecube's live coverage coming to you from the big apple in new york city we're talking all things aws summit but right now i've got two powerhouses you know them you love them john furrier dave vellante going to be talking about super cloud guys we've been talking a lot about this there's a big event coming up on the cube august 9th and i gotta start dave with you because we talk about it pretty much in every interview where it's relevant why super cloud yeah so john furrier years ago started a tradition lisa prior to aws which was to lay down the expectation for our audiences what they should be looking for at aws reinvent okay john when did that start 2012 2013. actually 2013 was our first but 2015 was the first time when we get access to andy jassy who wasn't doing any briefings and we realized that the whole industry started looking at amazon web services as a structural forcing function of massive change uh some say inflection point we were saying complete redefinition so you wrote the trillion dollar baby yeah right which actually turns into probably multi-trillion dollars we got it right on that one surprisingly it was pretty obvious so every year since then john has published the seminal article prior to reinvent so this year we were talking we're coming out of the isolation economy and john hedwig also also adam silevski was the new ceo so we had a one-on-one with adam that's right and then that's where the convergence between andy jassy and adam celebski kicked in which is essentially those guys work together even though they he went off and boomerang back in as they say in aws but what's interesting was is that adam zluski's point of view piggyback jassy but he had a different twist yeah some so you know low you know people who didn't have really a lot of thought into it said oh he's copying microsoft moving up the stack we're like no no no no no something structural is happening again and so john wrote the piece and he started sharing it we're collaborating he said hey dave take a take a look add your perspectives and then jerry chen had just written castles in the cloud and he talked about sub-markets and we were sort of noodling and one of the other things was in 2018 2019 around that time at aws re invent there was this friction between like snowflake and aws because redshift separated compute from storage which was snowflake's whole thing now fast forward to 2021 after we're leaving you know the covert economy by the way everyone was complaining they are asking jassy are you competing with your ecosystem the classic right trope and then in in remember jason used to use cloudera as the example i would like to maybe pick a better example snowflake became that example and what the transition was it went from hey we're kind of competitive for sure there's a lot of examples but it went from we're competitive they're stealing our stuff to you know what we're making so much money building on top of aws specifically but also the clouds and cross clouds so we said there's something new happening in the ecosystem and then just it popped up this term super cloud came up to connote a layer that floats above the hyperscale capex not is it's not pass it's not sas it's the combination of the of those things on top of a new digital infrastructure and we chose the term super cloud we liked it better than multi-cloud because multiplayer at least one other point too i think four or five years earlier dave and i across not just aws reinvent all of our other events we were speculating that there might be a tier two cloud service provider models and we've talked with intel about this and others just kind of like evaluating it staring at it and we met by tier two like maybe competing against amazon but what happened was it wasn't a tier two cloud it was a super cloud built on the capex of aws which means initially was a company didn't have to build aws to be like aws and everybody wanted to be like aws so we saw the emergence of the smart companies saying hey let's refactor our business model in the category or industry scope and to dominate with cloud scale and they did it that then continued that was the premise of chen's post which was kind of rift on the cube initially which is you can have a moat in a castle in the cloud and have a competitive advantage and a sustainable differentiation model and that's exactly what's happening and then you introduce the edge and hybrid you now have a cloud operating model that that super cloud extends as a substrate across all environments so it's not multi-cloud which sounds broken and like put it distance jointed joint barriers hybrid cloud which is the hybrid operating model at scale and you don't have to be amazon to take advantage of all the value creation since they took care of the capex now they win too on the other side because because they're selling ec2 and storage and ml and ai and this is new and this is information that people don't might not know about internally at aws there was a debate dave okay i heard this from sources do we go all in and compete and just own the whole category or open the ecosystem and coexist with [ __ ] why do we have these other companies or snowflake and guess what the decision was let's make it open ecosystem and let's have our own offerings as well and let the winner take off smart because they can't hire enough people and we just had aws and snowflake on the cube a few weeks ago talking about the partnership the co-op petition the value in it but what's been driving it is the voice of the customer but i want to ask you paint the picture for the audience of the critical key components of super cloud what are those yeah so i think first and foremost super cloud as john was saying it's not multi-cloud chuck whitten had a great phrase at dell tech world he said multi-cloud by default right versus multi-cloud by design and multi-cloud has been by default it's been this sort of i run in aws and i run my stack in azure or i run my stack in gcp and it works or i wrap my stack in a container and host it in the cloud that's what multi-cloud has been so the first sort of concept is it's a layer that that abstracts the underlying complexity of all the clouds all the primitives uh it takes advantage of maybe graviton or microsoft tooling hides all that and builds new value on top of that the other piece of of super cloud is it's ecosystem driven really interesting story you just told because literally amazon can't hire everybody right so they have to rely on the ecosystem for feature acceleration so it's it also includes a path layer a super pass layer we call it because you need to develop applications that are specific to the problem that the super cloud is solving so it's not a generic path like openshift it's specific to whether it's snowflake or [ __ ] or aviatrix so that developers can actually build on top of and not have to worry about that underlying and also there's some people that are criticizing um what we're doing in a good way because we want to have an open concept sure but here's the thing that a lot of people don't understand they're criticizing or trying to kind of shoot holes in our new structural change that we're identifying to comparing it to old that's like saying mainframe and mini computers it's like saying well the mainframe does it this way therefore there's no way that's going to be legitimate so the old thinking dave is from people that have no real foresight in the new model right and so they don't really get it right so what i'm saying is that we look at structural change structural change is structural change it either happens or it doesn't so what we're observing is the fact that a snowflake didn't design their solution to be multi-cloud they did it all on aws and then said hey why would we why are we going to stop there let's go to azure because microsoft's got a boatload of customers because they have a vertically stacking integration for their install base so if i'm snowflake why wouldn't i be on azure and the same for gcp and the same for other things so this idea that you can get the value of an amp what amazon did leverage and all that value without paying for it up front is a huge dynamic and that's not just saying oh that's cloud that's saying i have a cloud-like scale cloud-like value proposition which which will look like an ecosystem so to me the acid test is if i build on top of say [ __ ] or say snowflake or super cloud by default i'm either a category leader i own the data at scale or i'm sharing data at scale and i have an ecosystem people are building on top of me so that's a platform so that's really difficult so what's happening is these ecosystem partners are taking advantage as john said of all the hyperscale capex and they're building out their version of a distributed global system and then the other attribute of super cloud is it's got metadata management capability in other words it knows if i'm optimizing for latency where in the super cloud to get the data or how to protect privacy or sovereignty or how many copies to make to have the proper data protection or where the air gap should be for ransomware so these are examples of very specific purpose-built super clouds that are filling gaps that the hyperscalers aren't going after what's a good example of a specific super cloud that you think really articulates what you guys are talking about i think there are a lot of them i think snowflake is a really good example i think vmware is building a multi-cloud management system i think aviatrix and virtual you know private cloud networking and for high performance networking i think to a certain extent what oracle is doing with azure is is is definitely looks like a super cloud i think what capital one is doing by building on to taking their own tools and and and moving that to snowflake now that they're not cross-cloud yet but i predict that they will be of i think uh what veeam is doing in data protection uh dell what they showed at dell tech world with project alpine these are all early examples of super well here's an indicator here's how you look at the example so to me if you're just lifting and shifting that was the first gen cloud that's not changing the business model so i think the number one thing to look at is is the company whether they're in a vertical like insurance or fintech or financial are they refactoring their spend not as an i.t cost but as a refactoring of their business model yes like what snowflake did dave or they say okay i'm gonna change how i operate not change my business model per se or not my business identity if i'm gonna provide financial services i don't have to spend capex it's operating expenses i get the capex leverage i redefine i get the data at scale and now i become a service provider to everybody else because scale will determine the power law of who wins in the verticals and in the industry so we believe that snowflake is a data warehouse in the cloud they call it a data cloud now i don't think snowflake would like that dave i call them a data warehouse no a super data cloud but but so the other key here is you know the old saying that andreessen came up with i guess with every company's a software company well what does that mean it means every company software company every company is going digital well how are they going to do that they're going to do that by taking their business their data their tooling their proprietary you know moat and moving that to the cloud so they can compete at scale every company should be if they're not thinking about doing a super cloud well walmart i think i think andreessen's wrong i think i would revise and say that andreessen and the brain trust at andreas and horowitz is that that's no longer irrelevant every company isn't a software company the software industry is called open source everybody is an open source company and every company will be at super cloud that survives yeah to me to me if you're not looking at super cloud as a strategy to get value and refactor your business model take advantage of what you're paying it for but you're paying now in a new way you're building out value so that's you're either going to be a super cloud or get services from a super cloud so if you're not it's like the old joke dave if you're at the table and you don't know who the sucker is it's probably you right so if you're looking at the marketplace you're saying if i'm not a super cloud i'm probably gonna have to work with one because they're gonna have the data they're gonna have the insights they're gonna have the scale they're going to have the castle in the cloud and they will be called a super cloud so in customer conversations helping customers identify workloads to move to the cloud what are the ideal workloads and services to run in super cloud so i honestly think virtually any workload could be a candidate and i think that it's really the business that they're in that's going to define the workload i'll say what i mean so there's certain businesses where low latency high performance transactions are going to matter that's you know kind of the oracle's business there's certain businesses like snowflake where data sharing is the objective how do i share data in a governed way in a secure way in any location across the world that i can monetize so that's their objective you take a data protection company like veeam their objective is to protect data so they have very specific objectives that ultimately dictate what the workload looks like couchbase is another one they they in my opinion are doing some of the most interesting things at the edge because this is where when you when you really push companies in the cloud including the hyperscalers when they get out to the far edge it starts to get a little squishy couchbase actually is developing capabilities to do that and that's to me that's the big wild card john i think you described it accurately the cloud is expanding you've got public clouds no longer just remote services you're including on-prem and now expanding out to the near edge and the deep what do you call it deep edge or far edge lower sousa called the tiny edge right deep edge well i mean look at look at amazon's outpost announcement to me hp e is opportunity dell has opportunities the hardware box guys companies they have an opportunity to be that gear to be an outpost to be their own output they get better stacks they have better gear they just got to run cloud on it yeah right that's an edge node right so so that's that would be part of the super cloud so this is where i think people that are looking at the old models like operating systems or systems mindsets from the 80s they look they're not understanding the new architecture what i would say to them is yeah i hear what you're saying but the structural change is the nodes on the network distributed computing if you will is going to run hybrid cloud all the way across the fact that it's multiple clouds is just coincidence on who's got the best capex value that people build on for their super cloud capability so why wouldn't i be on azure if microsoft's going to give me all their customers that are running office 365 and teams great if i want to be on amazon's kind of sweet which is their ecosystem why wouldn't i want to tap into that so again you can patch it all together in the super cloud so i think the future will be distributed computing cloud architecture end to end and and we felt that was different from multi-cloud you know if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0 that's fine but you know frankly you know sometimes we get criticized for not defining it tightly enough but we continue to evolve that definition i've never really seen a great definition from multi-cloud i think multi-cloud by default was the definition i run in multiple clouds you know it works in azure it's not a strategy it's a broken name it's a symptom right it's a symptom of multi-vendor is really what multi-cloud has been and so we felt like it was a new term of examples look what we're talking about snowflake data bricks databricks another good one these are these are examples goldman sachs and we felt like the term immediately connotes something bigger something that sits above the clouds and is part of a digital platform you know the people poo poo the metaverse because it's really you know not well defined but every 15 or 20 years this industry goes through dave let me ask you a question so uh lisa you too if i'm in the insurance vertical uh and i'm a i'm an insurance company i have competitors my customers can go there and and do business with that company and you know and they all know that they go to the same conferences but in that sector now you have new dynamics your i.t spend isn't going to keep the lights on and make your apps work your back-end systems and your mobile app to get your whatever now it's like i have cloud scale so what if i refactored my business model become a super cloud and become the major primary service provider to all the competitors and the people that are the the the channel partners of the of the ecosystem that means that company could change the category totally okay and become the dominant category leader literally in two three years if i'm geico okay i i got business in the cloud because i got the app and i'm doing transactions on geico but with all the data that they're collecting there's adjacent businesses that they can get into maybe they're in the safety business maybe they can sell data to governments maybe they can inform logistics and highway you know patterns roll up all the people that don't have the same scale they have and service them with that data and they get subscription revenue and they can build on top of the geico super insurance cloud right yes it's it's unlimited opportunity that's why it's but the multi-trillion dollar baby so talk to us you've done an amazing job of talking which i know you would of why super cloud what it is the critical components the key workloads great examples talk to us in our last few minutes about the event the cube on super cloud august 9th what's the audience going to who are they going to hear from what are they going to learn yeah so august 9th live out of our palo alto studio we're going to have a program that's going to run from 9 a.m to 1 p.m and we're going to have a number of industry luminaries in there uh kit colbert from from vmware is going to talk about you know their strategy uh benoit de javille uh from snowflake is going to is going to be there of g written house of sky-high security um i i i don't want to give it away but i think steve mullaney is going to come on adrian uh cockroft is coming on the panel keith townsend sanjeev mohan will be on so we'll be running that live and also we'll be bringing in pre-recorded interviews that we'll have prior to the show that will run post the live event it's really a pilot virtual event we want to do a physical event we're thinking but the pilot is to bring our trusted friends together they're credible that have industry experience to try to understand the scope of what we're talking about and open it up and help flesh out the definition make it an open model where we can it's not just our opinion we're observing identifying the structural changes but bringing in smart people our smart friends and companies are saying yeah we get behind this because it has it has legs for a reason so we're gonna zoom out and let people participate and let the conversation and the community drive the content and that is super important to the cube as you know dave but i think that's what's going on lisa is that it's a pilot if it has legs we'll do a physical event certainly we're getting phones to bring it off the hook for sponsors so we don't want to go and go all in on sponsorships right now because it's not about money making it's about getting that super cloud clarity around to help companies yeah we want to evolve the concept and and bring in outside perspectives well the community is one of the best places to do that absolutely organic it's an organic community where i mean people want to find out what's going on with the best practices of how to transform a business and right now digital transformation is not just getting digitized it's taking advantage of the technology to leapfrog the competition so all the successful people we talked to at least have the same common theme i'm changing my game but not changing my game to the customer i'm just going to do it differently better faster cheaper more efficient and have higher margins and beat the competition that's the company doesn't want to beat the competition go to thecube.net if you're not all they're all ready to register for the cube on supercloud august 9th 9am pacific you won't want to miss it for john furrier and dave vellante i'm lisa martin we're all coming at you from new york city at aws summit 22. i'll be right back with our next guest [Music] you

(light music) >> Hello, welcome back everybody to theCUBE's coverage in New York City of AWS Summit 2022. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We had Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin here earlier. I'm going to wrap it up here with James Forrester, last interview of the day here in New York. Wish we would have had another day. It's a packed house, 10,000 people. James Forrester's the VP Worldwide Technical Leader for VMware's Cloud on AWS. On AWS is a big distinction. James, welcome to theCube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much, John. It's great to be here. >> So I think it's been like six years since the announcement of VMware's Cloud on AWS, which is a separate instance, separate hardware, but it's changed the game for VMware. You guys have done a lot of work, successful traction with customers. Clarified, I remember at that time, it really clarified VMware's Cloud play. Which then gave VMware more time to work on what it's doing now, which is, you know, using all their assets and their operations with Tanzu, Monterey, Cloud Native, Cross Cloud. What they call you guys call Cross Cloud, I call Super Cloud, action, a lot of stuff happening. So thanks for coming on. Okay. So first question is, what's the future look like for VMware's Cloud on AWS? >> Super bright, super bright. And there's a couple of great reasons for that. I think firstly, what we're seeing is that customers have now made enough progress in their cloud journeys. Many of them have chosen AWS and they're going full force. We're going to help them go faster. We're going to help them get there and get native to those adjacent services much quicker with more confidence and more resiliency. So it's a super exciting time to be doing what we do. >> You know, VMware has had a steady install base, okay. I mean basically it's like almost ingrained in the operations. What do you guys see as that next level step up function? Because you know, obviously Broadcom is buying VMware. Obviously that utility will be in place, but there's more. There's more there that customers can tap into. This is the promise of the cross-cloud. How do you talk about that when you got the AWS action? How does that all integrate? >> Yeah, absolutely. And of course, because so many customers are going to AWS on their own cloud journeys right now, what we get to have the conversation about is how they can get there more confidently. And so for customers who are just starting out, who are looking at their application portfolios, who have a ton of skilled IT professionals who they want to bring into that cloud journey, they can use the skills they already have. For those folks who are a little bit further along but they may be finding that refactoring their applications is more complex, more difficult that they anticipated, we give them a way of moving with confidence and with much less risk so they can do those cloud journeys that they anticipated. >> You know, James, I want to get your thoughts on what the state of the current situation is, vis-à-vis, your customers and your customers' appetite for AWS services. 'Cause one of the promises of the original deal was clarifying messaging but more importantly, customers can get the VMware Cloud and take advantage of the higher level services on AWS. What's the update there? What's the current state of the art? What's some of the patterns that you're seeing on the uptake of services and how they're working together? >> Yeah, it's a great call out. And honestly, one of the misconceptions that I address right out of the gate is that somehow going VMware Cloud takes you away from those services. It doesn't, it gets you closer to them. Full, direct, native access to all of those hundreds of great AWS services. So what we often find is that customers have their enterprise data, inside data workloads in their data centers. But what they want to do is get that up next to the AWS services that can use it, like Redshift and Athena and Glue. They can move those workloads right adjacent to those services to start using them right away. So it's a great way to look at the platform. >> So one of the observations that's pretty well understood right now by most people, I'd say 90%, if not more, not a hundred percent 'cause I've heard people like not get it, but it's pretty clear that the operating model for the the enterprise will be hybrid as a steady state. I don't think there's any debate on that unless you think there is. >> Do you feel the same- >> No debate. No debate. >> Okay. Hybrid's a steady state. What does that mean as clients start to think about edge and their data centers. 'Cause now the private cloud is back in the game. So I've heard people talk about private cloud, which we, I think we coined the term with Dave, Wikibon years ago, but it kind of went away because that was not the public cloud. So public cloud won, on premise didn't go away. We saw Amazon with Outpost. So now they're like, I can still have stuff on prem and run it in a cloud operations. So they're calling that private cloud, I think. So you're starting to hear the same things. What it means basically is that hybrid is winning. It's the standard. What does the hybrid environment look like from a VMware perspective as you guys look at that and have been building that out 'cause you have customers that are on premises. >> Yeah. >> Is it just to the cloud and back? Is it, is there any changes? Is there new connective tissue? Is there a glue layer? What's the operating model for VMware customers? >> Well, customers wanted those same benefits from public cloud agility, cost benefits, elasticity, innovation, sovereignty, sustainability, but they wanted to be able to do that everywhere. They wanted it in their data centers. They wanted it at the edge. And as you've pointed out public cloud delivered that for customers. AWS first out there delivering that for customers. Now with innovations like VMware Cloud and AWS outpost, we're able to bring that back into the data center. We're able to bring those same benefits of public cloud into the customers on-prem environment. And you're right. We see hybrid just rolling and rolling and being able to offer our solution across all of it. >> Yeah, we're big fans of VMware because theCube's 12 years old, we've been at every VMworld. Now they're calling it VMware Explorer, the events coming up. So the folks watching, plug for VMware Explorer, formerly VMworld, it's on the schedule. Content catalog just came out last week. It's looking pretty good. So put a plug out there. We'll be there with theCube, two sets. So you know, if you're going to VMworld, now Explorer go register, get up there. It's in San Francisco, always a great event. vSphere and vSAN, always great products. But you got Carbon Black, you got Security. So these things have all been working kind of pistons for VMware. Tanzu, I know Raghu and those guys are doing it. Craig McLuckie and team, they're working on that. You got Tanzu, you got Monterey. That's the new cloud native thing. How is that tracking vis-à-vis, the operating model of the the core engine, vSphere, vSAN and others. And then with the native services of Cloud. So you got AWS Cloud with VMware Cloud, vSphere, vSAN, Carbon Black, and Security. And then you got the Tanzu over here. How are those three things coming together? >> Well, the services that customers know and love first and foremost that they've been running the mission critical workloads on, vSphere, vSAN, NSX. What VMware cloud and AWS is, is a packaging together of those services. So customers don't have to configure it all themselves and do the heavy lifting. We manage and run it on their behalf. What we are adding to that most recently with Tanzu is now the ability to run containers within the same environment. 'Cause customers tell us they've got parts of their organization that are very much on vSphere VMs. Parts of their organization are moving to containers. We want be able to provide a single operating model, a single layer, a single way of managing all of that. No matter where it's deployed. >> You know, remember back in the day, when Raghu wasn't the CEO, Carl Eschenbach was there, Sanjay Poonen was there. Carl's now at Sequoia Capital, Raghu's a CEO. Sanjay's kind of looking for a next gig. I always said, why doesn't vSphere and NSX become that abstraction layer and commoditize the network so that white boxes and Dell and HP could all play in that layer? It just never happened yet. Is that something you guys talk about at all? Like, I mean in the, in the smokey room, in the execs, is that happening? What's the vision? >> Well, we always work backwards- from customers, right? (John laughing) And what customers are telling us is they want us to help them with that undifferentiated heavy lifting. So who knows where that could take us, but right now we're very focused on helping those customers move with confidence to the cloud. >> You didn't take the bait on that one. I appreciate that. (James laughing) Okay. So let's get some perspective. You're out with customers. What are the big things that you're seeing right now from your customers right now? 'Cause you look behind us here, 10,000 people at this event. This is not a no-show. This is not a throwaway event in, you know, somewhere in the corner of the world. This is New York City, only one summit. This is bigger than Snowflake Summit and that was packed. So from an event standpoint, this is pretty a big game statement here for AWS. These companies are not experiencing headwinds, they're changing. So what are your customers telling you around what they're looking at for the cloud native architecture? I mean obviously the digital transformation is continuing, obviously clouds here. And again, we were saying earlier, this is the first time in history that the cloud hyperscalers have been in market during a so-called downturn. So there's no other data. 2008, I wouldn't call 'em up and running. They were building, but AWS, Azure, others, these cloud players they're in market. And so you're starting to see kind of some data coming out saying, Hey, this thing's still working, the engine of innovation is cranking out and it's not slowing down the digital transformation. It might change the capital markets and valuations but it's not changing customers. That's what I'm hearing. Now, you probably would agree with that, right? >> James: I think that's exactly right. >> Okay. So let's stay with that. If you believe that, then it's like, okay, what are they doing? So what are customers doubling down on? What are some of the patterns you're seeing in the environment today that you could share with the audience? >> Yeah, so I think first and foremost is that steady transition to the cloud to deliver all of those benefits, agility, cost, elasticity, innovation, sovereignty, sustainability that hasn't gone away at all. In fact, it's only accelerated. With workloads like virtual desktops, which became so critical during COVID the need to be able to provide that kind of scalable elastic capacity has only increased. Now, coupled with that, most of these customers are already on a cloud journey. And while some folks may have had the luxury of letting that go a little bit more slowly, nowadays the urgency is pervasive across all of the industries that we get to talk to in New York. Everyone needs to go faster. Everybody's not seeing the progress that they expected that we think we can help them deliver. So the opportunity I think that's come out of COVID is more workloads, different use cases, disaster recovery, ransomware- >> Is that more of an awareness or reality or both? >> Both. Absolutely. >> Okay. So let me ask the next question. 'Cause this is a good conversation, I think. I agree a hundred percent. We're seeing the same exact thing. Now let's talk about how companies are thinking about the real opportunity that's emerged, which is refactoring the business model without actually changing the makeup of the organization per se, to take on new territories and potentially take over categories. >> James: Mm hmm. >> So I mean a data warehouse and a data cloud's kind of the same thing. Snowflake probably wouldn't like me saying that they're a data warehouse because they call themselves a data cloud, but it's kind of the same thing, just refactored on AWS. >> James: Yep. >> That's a super cloud. So that's an opportunity for everyone to do that in every vertical. How many customers are actually thinking that way and actually taking steps to pursue that, capture that opportunity? Or do you agree it's the opportunity? >> No, I think that that is an opportunity and I love that idea of super cloud in that what I think customers have started to realize, over the last couple of years in particular, is it's very difficult to take advantage of all of those great cloud services if your applications are still behind a whole lot of different layers of firewalls and so forth. So getting the application close to those services, in proximity to those services is that first step in modernization. Then it doesn't have to be a change the wings on the plane while it's flying conversation, which- >> John: Yeah. >> You know, is very risky for a lot of organizations. >> John: Exactly. >> It's a let's get the plane going a little bit faster. Let's get the plane going a little bit smoother, and let's get the plane to its destination with less risk. >> You know, James, that reminds me of the old school conversations of non disruptive operations. Remember those days? >> James: I do, yeah. >> Mostly around storage and, and servers. But that's what basically what you're saying. Transform while operating, right? >> James: Exactly. >> So this is, you can do both. You got to make time and it's a talent question too. I'd love to get your thoughts on how customers are thinking about who do you put on which task. 'Cause you want your A players on both areas. You don't want all your A players, what I hear, CSOs and CIOs telling me is that, I put all my A players on transformation, I got no one running the business. >> James: Mm hmm. >> So you got to kind of balance. That's a cultural team decision. >> It's a cultural team decision. It's also a skills marketplace decision. >> John: Yeah. >> And there's a practical reality to the skills that are available and how fast you can hire them. So a big part of the conversation that we have is when customers have existing skills sets, plug those into their transformation, plug those into their business outcomes. I like to use the phrase, "Let's make heroes out of IT" because they can be a much more critical player than they think they can be. Yeah, IT basically is not even around anymore. It's part of the organization. And then you have data science and data engineering coming in. So it's, you know, IT is not a department anymore, it's the company >> Exactly right. >> If you're kind of going down that road, yeah. >> Yeah. Alright, so final question. What's the biggest change you've seen and observed in your current year and a half? You know, we're coming out of COVID, knowing what was before, what sea change, what inflection point are we in now? How would you describe this current market? 'Cause again, we're kind of in a unique market. You know, you got crypto around the corner, people getting attracted to that, little bubbly obviously, reality of cloud and 2.0 or super cloud emerging. On premise is not going away. Edge exploding on the industrial side, especially with machine learning coming along. So this operating model is clearly in sight. What's the biggest observation you've noticed. >> I think it's the sense of urgency over the last couple of years in that most customers I talked to are no longer relaxed about the timing of delivering cloud capabilities to their organizations. Most customers are on sort of a transformation journey of their own and digital transformation and cloud transformation are absolutely fundamental to that. >> One more real quick follow up question if you don't mind, 'cause I appreciate your time. One of the things that's come up a lot in our conversations is the role of the ecosystem. Not only as a part of the business model but also validation of the enablement that cloud offers companies. You have an enabling platform, your ecosystem is well known. And so your customers are starting to develop ecosystems. So if the cloud model kind of trickles like downstream, ecosystem is kind of a proof of something. >> James: Mm hmm. >> What's your view of all this ecosystem discussion as we transform this next generation? >> Yeah, I think it touches on a couple of things. So obviously there is a technology ecosystem, which is evolving very rapidly in support of cloud and cloud transformation. But what's interesting, I think is the business ecosystem that's evolving around it. We're seeing our customers evolve their own businesses to assume that those cloud capabilities will be available to them. And if the cloud capabilities are not available to them in a timely fashion, then the ecosystem starts to have a domino effect. So the ecosystems are interdependent between business, and technology, and skills, and talent. And I think that's a great to be >> James Forrester, they're going to shut us down. The speakers are on, they're going to pull the plug. Thanks for being our last interview here in New York City and bringing us home. Really appreciate you taking the time to come on theCube. >> John, thanks so much. Great to be here, really enjoyed it. Okay. We are wrapping it up here in New York City. I'm John Ford with theCube, great day. For Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, and the entire crew of theCube here on the ground. Live in person events are back. theCube hybrid, get online, check out our coverage there. The SiliconANGLE and thecube.net. I'm John Furrier signing off from New York City. See you next time. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> Man: We're good. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of AWS Summit NYC. We're in New York City, been here all day. Lisa Martin, John Furrier, talking with AWS partners ecosystem folks, customers, AWS folks, you name it. Next up, one of our alumni, rejoins us. Please welcome Anshu Sharma the co-founder and CEO of Skyflow. Anshu great to have you back on theCube. >> Likewise, I'm excited to be back. >> So I love how you guys founded this company. Your inspiration was the zero trust data privacy vault pioneered by two of our favorites, Apple and Netflix. You started with a simple question. What if privacy had an API? So you built a data privacy vault delivered as an API. Talk to us, and it's only in the last three and a half years. Talk to us about a data privacy vault and what's so unique about it. >> Sure. I think if you think about all the key challenges we are seeing in our personal lives when we are dealing with technology companies a lot of anxiety is around what happens to my data, right? If you want to go to a pharmacy they want to know not just your health ID number but they want to know your social security number your credit card number, your phone number and all of that information is actually useful because they need to be able to engage with you. And it's true for hospitals, health systems. It's true for your bank. It's true for pretty much anybody you do business with even an event like this. But then question that keeps coming up is where does this data go? And how is it protected? And the state of the art here has always been to keep kind of, keep it protected when it's in storage but almost all the breaches, all the hacks happen not because you've steal somebody's disc, but because someone enters through an API or a portal. So the question we asked was we've been building different shapes of containers for different types of data. You don't store your logs in a data warehouse. You don't store your analytical data in a regular RDBMS. Similarly, you don't store your passwords and usernames you store them in identity systems. So if PI is so special why isn't it a container that's used for storing PII? So that's how the idea of Pii.World came up. >> So you guys just got a recent funding, a series B financing which means for the folks out there that don't know the inside baseball, must people do, means you're doing well. It's hard to get that round of funding means you're up and growing to the right. What's the differentiator? Why are you guys so successful? Why the investment growth, what's the momentum driver? >> So I think in some ways we took one of the most complex problems, data privacy, like half the people can't even describe like, does data privacy mean like I have to be GDPR compliant or does it actually mean I'm protecting the data? So you have multiple stakeholders in any company. If you're a pharma company, you may have a chief privacy officer, a data officer, this officer, that officer, and all of these people were talking and the answer was buy more tools. So if you look around behind our back, there's probably dozens of companies out there. One protecting data in an API call another protecting data in a database, another one data warehouse. But as a CEO, CTO, I want to know what happens to my social security number from a customer end to end. So we said, if you can radically simplify the whole thing and the key insight was you can simplify it by actually isolating and protecting this data. And this architecture evolved on its own at companies like Apple and other places, but it takes dozens of engineers for those companies to build it out. So we like, well, the pattern will makes sense. It logically kind is just common sense. So instead of selling dozens of tools, we can just give you a very simple product, which is like one API call, you know, protect this data... >> So like Stripe is for a plugin for a financial transaction you plug it into the app, similar dynamic here, right? >> Exactly. So it's Stripe for payments, Twilio for Telephony. We have API for everything, but if you have social security numbers or pan numbers you still are like relying on DIY. So I think what differentiated us and attracted the investors was, if this works, >> It's huge. every company needs it. >> Well, that's the integration has become the key thing. I got to ask you because you mentioned GDPR and all the complexities around the laws and the different regulations. That could be a real blocker in a wet blanket for innovation. >> Anshu: Yes. >> And with the market we're seeing here at, at your Summit New York, small event. 10,000 people, more people here than were at Snowflake Summit as an example. And they're the hottest company in data. So this small little New York event is proven that that world is growing. So why should this wet blanket, these rules slow it down? How do you balance it? 'Cause that's a concern. If you checking all the boxes you're never actually building anything. >> So, you know, we just ran into a couple of customers who still are struggling with moving from the data center to AWS Cloud. Now the fact that here means they want to but something is holding them back. I also met the AI team of Amazon. They're doing some amazing work and they're like, the biggest hindrance for them is making customers feel safe when they do the machine learning. Because now you're opening up the data sets to more people. And in all of those cases your innovation basically stops because CSO is like, look you can't put PII in the cloud unprotected. And with the vault architecture we call it privacy by architecture. So there's a term called privacy by design. I'm like what the, is privacy by design, right? >> John: It's an architecture. (John laughing) >> But if you are an architecture and a developer like me I was like, I know what architecture is. I don't know what privacy by design is. >> So you guys are basically have that architecture by design which means foundational based services. So you're providing that as a service. So other people don't have to build the complex. >> Anshu: Exactly. >> You know that you will be Apple's backend team to build that privacy with you you get all that benefit. >> Exactly. And traditionally, people have had to make compromises. If you encrypt the data and secure it, then you can't use it. Using a proprietary polymorphic encryption technology you can actually have your cake and eat it to. So what that means for customers is, if you want to protect data in Snowflake or REDshare, use Skyflow with it. We have integrations to databases, to data lakes, all the common workflow tools. >> Can you give us a customer example that you think really articulates the value of what Skyflow is delivering? >> Well, I'll give you two examples. One in the FinTech space, one in the health space. So in the FinTech space this is a company called Nomi Health. They're a large payments processor for the health insurance market. And funnily enough, their CTO actually came from Goldman Sachs. He actually built apple card. (John laughing) Right? That if we all have in our phones. And he saw our product and he's like, for my new company, I'm going to just use you guys because I don't want to go hire 20 engineers. So for them, we had a HIPAA compliant environment a PCI compliant environment, SOC 2 compliant environment. And he can sleep better at night because he doesn't have to worry what is my engineer in Poland or Ukraine doing right now? I have a vault. I have rules set up. I can audit it. Everything is logged. Similarly for Science 37, they run clinical trials globally. They wanted to solve data residency. So for them the problem was, how do I run one common global instance? When the rules say you have to break everything up and that's very expensive. >> And so I love this. I'm a customer. For them a customer. I love it. You had me at hello, API integration. I love it. How much does it cost? What's it going to cost me? How do I need to think about my operationalizing? 'Cause I know with an API, I can do that. Am I paying by the usage, by the drink? How do I figure out? >> So we have programs for startups where it's really really inexpensive. We get them credits. And then for enterprises, we basically have a platform fee. And then based on the amount of data PII, we charge them. We don't nickel and dime the customers. We don't like the usage based model because, you don't know how many times you're going to hit an API. So we usually just based on the number of customer records that you have and you can hit them as many time as you want. There's no API limits. >> So unlimited record based. >> Exactly. that's your variable. >> Exactly. We think about you buying odd zero, for example, for authentication you pay them by the number of active users you have. So something similar. >> So you run on AWS, but you just announced a couple of new GTM partners, MuleSoft and plan. Can you talk to us about, start with MuleSoft? What are you doing and why? And the same with VLA? >> Sure. I mean, MuleSoft was very interesting customers who were adopting our products at, you know, we are buying this product for our new applications but what about our legacy code? We can't go in there and add APIs there. So the simplest way to do integration in the legacy world is to use an integration broker. So that's where MuleSoft integration came out and we announced that. It's a logical place for you to swap out real social security numbers with, you know, fake ones. And then we also announced a partnership with SnowFlake, same thing. I think every workload as it's moving to the cloud needs some kind of data protection with it. So I think going forward we are going to be announcing even more partnerships. So you can imagine all the places you're storing PII today whether it's in a call center solution or analytics solution, there's a PII story there. >> Talk about the integration aspect because I love the momentum. I get everything makes secure the customers all these environments, integrations are super important to plug into. And then how do I essentially operate you on my side? Do I import the records? How do you connect to my environment in my databases? >> So it's really, really easy when you encrypt the data and use Skyflow wall, we create what is called a format preserving token, which is essentially replacing a social security number with something that looks like an SSN but it's not. So that there's no schema changes involved. You just have to do that one time swap over and then in terms of integrations, most of these integrations are prebuilt. So Snowflake integration is prebuilt. MuleSoft integration is prebuilt. We're going to announce some new ones. So the goal is for off the table in platforms like Snowflake and MuleSoft, we prebuilt all the integrations. You can build your own. It takes about like a day. And then in terms of data import basically it's the same standard process that you would use with any other data store. >> Got to ask you about data breaches. Obviously the numbers in 2021 were huge. We're seeing so much change in the cyber security landscape ransomware becoming a household word, a matter of when but not if... How does Skyflow help organizations protect themselves or reduce the number of breaches so that they are not the next headline? >> You know, the funny thing about breaches is again and again, we see people doing the same mistakes, right? So Equifax had a breach four years ago where a customer portal, you know, no customer support rep should have access to a 100 million people's data. Like is that customer agent really accessing 100 million? But because we've been using legacy security tools they either give you access or don't give you access. And that's not how it's going to work. Because if I'm going to engage with the pharmacy and airline they need to be able to use my data in multiple different places. So you need to have fine grain controls around it. So I think the reason we keep getting breaches is cybersecurity industry is selling, 10s of billions of dollars worth of tools in the name of security but they cannot be applied at a fine grain level enough. I can't say things like for my call center agent that's living in Phoenix, Arizona they can only verify last four digits, but the same call center worker in Philippines can't even see that. So how do you get all that granular control in place? Is really why we keep seeing data breaches. So the Equifax breach, the Shopify breach the Twitter breaches, they're all the same. Like again and again, it's either an inside person or an external person who's gotten in. And once you're in and this is the whole idea of zero trust as you know. Once you're in, you can access all the data. Zero trust means that you don't assume that you actually isolate PII separately. >> A lot of the cybersecurity issues as you were talking about, are people based. Somebody clicking on something or gaining access. And I always talk to security experts about how do you control for the people aspect besides training, awareness, education. Is Skyflow a facilitator of that in a way that we haven't seen before? >> Yeah. So I think what ends up happening is, people even after they have breaches, they will lock down the system that had the breach, but then they have the same data sitting in a partner database, maybe a customer database maybe a billing system. So by centralizing and isolating PII in one system you can then post roles based access control rules. You can put limitations around it. But if you try to do that across hundreds of DS bases, you're just not going to be able to do it because it's basically just literally impossible, so... >> My final question for you is on, for me is you're here at AWS Summits, 10,000 people like I said. More people here than some big events and we're just in New York city. Okay. You actually work with AWS. What's next for you guys as you got the fresh funding, you guys looking for more talent, what's your next mountain you're going to climb? Tell us what's next for the company. Share your vision, put a plug in for the company. >> Well, it's actually very simple. Today we actually announced that we have a new chief revenue officer who's joining us. Tammy, she's joined us from LaunchDarkly which is it grew from like, you know, single digits to like over nine digits in revenue. And the reason she's joining Skyflow is because she sees the same inflection point hitting us. And for us that means more marketing, more sales, more growth in more geographies and more partnerships. And we think there's never been a better time to solve privacy. Literally everything that we deal with even things like rove evade issues eventually ties back into a issue around privacy. >> Lisa: Yes. >> AWS gets the model API, you know, come on, right? That's their model. >> Exactly. So I think if you look at the largest best companies that have been built in the last 20 years they took something that should have been simple but was not. There used to be Avayas of the world, selling Telephony intel, Twilio came and said, look an API. And we are trying to do the same to the entire security compliance and privacy industry is to narrow the problem down and solve it once. >> (indistinct) have it. We're going to get theCube API. (Lisa laughing) That's what we're going to do. All right. >> Thank you so much. >> Awesome. Anshu, thank you for joining us, talking to us about what's new at Skyflow. It sounds like you got that big funding investment. Probably lots of strategic innovation about to happen. So you'll have to come back in a few months and maybe at next reinvent in six months and tell us what's new, what's going on. >> Last theCube interview was very well received. People really like the kind of questions you guys asked. So I love this show and I think... >> It's great when you're a star like you, you got good market, great team, smart. I mean, look at this. I mean, what slow down are we talking about here? >> Yeah. I don't see... >> There is no slow down on the enterprise. >> Privacy's hot and it's incredibly important and we're only going to be seeing more and more of it. >> You can talk to any CIO, CSO, CTO or the board and they will tell you there is no limit to the budget they have for solving the core privacy issues. We love that. >> John: So you want to move on to building? >> Lisa: Obviously that must make you smile. >> John: You solved a big problem. >> Thank you. >> Awesome. Anshu, thank you again. Congrats on the momentum and we'll see you next time and hear more on the evolution of Skyflow. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> For John furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live from New York City at AWS Summit NYC 22. We'll be right back with our next guest. So stick around. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage here. New York city for AWS Amazon web services summit 2022. I'm John furrier, host of the cube with Dave ante. My co-host. We are breaking it down, getting an update on the ecosystem. As the GDP drops, inflations up gas prices up the enterprise continues to grow. We're seeing exceptional growth. We're here on the ground floor. Live at the Summit's packed house, 10,000 people. Eric Bradley's here. Chief STR at ETR, one of the premier enterprise research firms out there, partners with the cube and powers are breaking analysis that Dave does check that out as the hottest podcast in enterprise. Eric. Great to have you on the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate the collaboration always. >>Yeah. Great stuff. Your data's amazing ETR folks watching check out ETR. They have a unique formula, very accurate. We love it. It's been moving the market. Congratulations. Let's talk about the market right now. This market is booming. Enterprise is the hottest thing, consumers kind of in the toilet. Okay. I said that all right, back out devices and, and, and consumer enterprise is still growing. And by the way, this first downturn, the history of the world where hyperscalers are on full pumping on all cylinders, which means they're still powering the revolution. >>Yeah, it's true. The hyperscalers were basically at this two sun system when Microsoft and an AWS first came around and everything was orbiting around it. And we're starting to see that sun cool off a little bit, but we're talking about a gradient here, right? When we say cool off, we're not talking to shutdown, it's still burning hot. That's for sure. And I can get it to some of the macro data in a minute, if that's all right. Or do you want me to go right? No, go go. Right. Yeah. So right now we just closed our most recent survey and that's macro and vendor specific. We had 1200 people talk to us on the macro side. And what we're seeing here is a cool down in spending. We originally had about 8.5% increase in budgets. That's cool down is 6.5 now, but I'll say with the doom and gloom and the headlines that we're seeing every day, 6.5% growth coming off of what we just did the last couple of years is still pretty fantastic as a backdrop. >>Okay. So you, you started to see John mentioned consumer. We saw that in Snowflake's earnings. For example, we, we certainly saw, you know, Walmart, other retailers, the FA Facebooks of the world where consumption was being dialed down, certain snowflake customers. Not necessarily, they didn't have mentioned any customers, but they were able to say, all right, we're gonna dial down, consumption this quarter, hold on until we saw some of that in snowflake results and other results. But at the same time, the rest of the industry is booming. But your data is showing softness within the fortune 500 for AWS, >>Not only AWS, but fortune 500 across the board. Okay. So going back to that larger macro data, the biggest drop in spending that we captured is fortune 500, which is surprising. But at the same time, these companies have a better purview into the economy. In general, they tend to see things further in advance. And we often remember they spend a lot of money, so they don't need to play catch up. They'll easily more easily be able to pump the brakes a little bit in the fortune 500. But to your point, when we get into the AWS data, the fortune 500 decrease seems to be hitting them a little bit more than it is Azure and GCP. I >>Mean, we're still talking about a huge business, right? >>I mean, they're catching up. I mean, Amazon has been transforming from owning the developer cloud startup cloud decade ago to really putting a dent on the enterprise as being number one cloud. And I still contest that they're number one by a long ways, but Azure kicking ass and catching up. Okay. You seeing people move to Azure, you got Charlie bell over there, Sean, by former Amazonians, Theresa Carlson, people are going over there, there there's lift over at Azure. >>There certainly is. >>Is there kinks in the arm or for AWS? There's >>A couple of kinks, but I think your point is really good. We need to take a second there. If you're talking about true pass or infrastructure is a service true cloud compute. I think AWS still is the powerhouse. And a lot of times the, the data gets a little muddied because Azure is really a hosted platform for applications. And you're not really sure where that line is drawn. And I think that's an important caveat to make, but based on the data, yes, we are seeing some kinks in the armor for AWS. Yes. Explain. So right now, a first of all caveat, 40% net score, which is our proprietary spending metric across the board. So we're not like raising any alarms here. It's still strong that said there are declines and there are declines pretty much across the board. The only spot we're not seeing a decline at all is in container, spend everything else is coming down specifically. We're seeing it come down in data analytics, data warehousing, and M I, which is a little bit of a concern because that, that rate of decline is not the same with Azure. >>Okay. So I gotta ask macro, I see the headwinds on the macro side, you pointed that out. Is there any insight into any underlying conditions that might be there on AWS or just a chronic kind of situational thing >>Right now? It seems situational. Other than that correlation between their big fortune 500, you know, audience and that being our biggest decline. The other aspect of the macro survey is we ask people, if you are planning to decline spend, how do you plan on doing it? And the number two answer is taking a look at our cloud spend and auditing it. So they're kind say, all right, you know, for the last 10 years it's been drunken, sail or spend, I >>Was gonna use that same line, you know, >>Cloud spend, just spend and we'll figure it out later, who cares? And then right now it's time to tighten the belts a little bit, >>But this is part of the allure of cloud at some point. Yeah. You, you could say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna dial it down. I'm gonna rein it in. So that's part of the reason why people go to the cloud. I want to, I wanna focus in on the data side of things and specifically the database. Let, just to give some context if, and correct me if I'm, I'm a little off here, but snowflake, which hot company, you know, on the planet, their net score was up around 80% consistently. It it's dropped down the last, you know, quarter, last survey to 60%. Yeah. So still highly, highly elevated, but that's relative to where Amazon is much larger, but you're saying they're coming down to the 40% level. Is that right? >>Yeah, they are. And I remember, you know, when I first started doing this 10 years ago, AWS at a 70%, you know, net score as well. So what's gonna happen over time is those adoptions are gonna get less and you're gonna see more flattening of spend, which ultimately is going to lower the score because we're looking for expansion rates. We wanna see adoption and increase. And when you see flattening a spend, it starts to contract a little bit. And you're right. Snowflake also was in the stratosphere that cooled off a little bit, but still, you know, very strong and AWS is coming down. I think the reason why it's so concerning is because a it's within the fortune 500 and their rate of decline is more than Azure right >>Now. Well, and, and one of the big trends you're seeing in database is this idea of converging function. In other words, bringing transaction and analytics right together at snowflake summit, they added the capability to handle transaction data, Mongo DB, which is largely mostly transactions added the capability in June to bring in analytic data. You see data bricks going from data engineering and data science now getting into snowflake space and analytics. So you're seeing that convergence Oracle is converging with my SQL heat wave and their core databases, couch base couch base is doing the same. Maria do virtually all these database companies are, are converging their platforms with the exception of AWS. AWS is still the right tool for the right job. So they've got Aurora, they've got RDS, they've got, you know, a dynamo DV, they've got red, they've got, you know, going on and on and on. And so the question everybody's asking is will that change? Will they start to sort of cross those swim lanes? We haven't seen it thus far. How is that affecting the data >>Performance? I mean, that's fantastic analysis. I think that's why we're seeing it because you have to be in the AWS ecosystem and they're really not playing nicely with others in the sandbox right now that now I will say, oh, Amazon's not playing nicely. Well, no, no. Simply to your point though, that there, the other ones are actually bringing in others at consolidating other different vendor types. And they're really not. You know, if you're in AWS, you need to stay within AWS. Now I will say their tools are fantastic. So if you do stay within AWS, they have a tool for every job they're advanced. And they're incredible. I think sometimes the complexity of their tools hurts them a little bit. Cause to your point earlier, AWS started as a developer-centric type of cloud. They have moved on to enterprise cloud and it's a little bit more business oriented, but their still roots are still DevOps friendly. And unless you're truly trained, AWS can be a little scary. >>So a common use case is I'm gonna be using Aurora for my transaction system and then I'm gonna ETL it into Redshift. Right. And, and I, now I have two data stores and I have two different sets of APIs and primitives two different teams of skills. And so that is probably causing some friction and complexity in the customer base that again, the question is, will they begin to expand some of those platforms to minimize some of that friction? >>Well, yeah, this is the question I wanted to ask on that point. So I've heard from people inside Amazon don't count out Redshift, we're making, we're catching up. I think that's my word, but they were kind of saying that right. Cuz Redshift is good, good database, but they're adding a lot more. So you got snowflake success. I think it's a little bit of a jealousy factor going on there within Redshift team, but then you got Azure synapse with the Synap product synapse. Yep. And then you got big query from Google big >>Query. Yep. >>What's the differentiation. What are you seeing for the data for the data warehouse or the data clouds that are out there for the customers? What's the data say, say to us? >>Yeah, unfortunately the data's showing that they're dropping a little bit whose day AWS is dropping a little bit now of their data products, Redshift and RDS are still the two highest of them, but they are starting to decline. Now I think one of the great data points that we have, we just closed the survey is we took a comparison of the legacy data. Now please forgive me for the word legacy. We're gonna anger a few people, but we Gotter data Oracle on-prem, we've got IBM. Some of those more legacy data warehouse type of names. When we look at our art survey takers that have them where their spend is going, that spends going to snowflake first, and then it's going to Google and then it's going to Microsoft Azure and, and AWS is actually declining in there. So when you talk about who's taking that legacy market share, it's not AWS right now. >>So legacy goes to legacy. So Microsoft, >>So, so let's work through in a little context because Redshift really was the first to take, you know, take the database to the cloud. And they did that by doing a one time license deal with par XL, which was an on-prem database. And then they re-engineered it, they did a fantastic job, but it was still engineered for on-prem. Then you along comes snowflake a couple years later and true cloud native, same thing with big query. Yep. True cloud native architecture. So they get a lot of props. Now what, what Amazon did, they took a page outta of the snowflake, for example, separating compute from storage. Now of course what's what, what Amazon did is actually not really completely separating like snowflake did they couldn't because of the architecture, they created a tearing system that you could dial down the compute. So little nuances like that. I understand. But at the end of the day, what we're seeing from snowflake is the gathering of an ecosystem in this true data cloud, bringing in different data types, they got to the public markets, data bricks was not able to get to the public markets. Yeah. And think is, is struggling >>And a 25 billion evaluation. >>Right. And so that's, that's gonna be dialed down, struggling somewhat from a go to market standpoint where snowflake has no troubles from a go to market. They are the masters at go to market. And so now they've got momentum. We talked to Frank sluman at the snowflake. He basically said, I'm not taking the foot off the gas, no way. Yeah. We, few of our large, you know, consumer customers dialed things down, but we're going balls to the >>Wall. Well, if you look at their show before you get in the numbers, you look at the two shows. Snowflake had their summit in person in Vegas. Data bricks has had their show in San Francisco. And if you compare the two shows, it's clear, who's winning snowflake is blew away from a, from a market standpoint. And we were at snowflake, but we weren't at data bricks, but there was really nothing online. I heard from sources that it was like less than 3000 people. So >>Snowflake was 1900 people in 2019, nearly 10,000. Yeah. In 2020, >>It's gonna be fun to sort of track that as a, as an odd caveat to say, okay, let's see what that growth is. Because in fairness, data, bricks, you know, a little bit younger, Snowflake's had a couple more years. So I'd be curious to see where they are. Their, their Lakehouse paradigm is interesting. >>Yeah. And I think it's >>And their product first company, yes. Their go to market might be a little bit weak from our analysis, but that, but they'll figure it out. >>CEO's pretty smart. But I think it's worth pointing out. It's like two different philosophies, right? It is. Snowflake is come into our data cloud. That's their proprietary environment. They're the, they think of the iPhone, right? End to end. We, we guarantee it's all gonna work. And we're in control. Snowflake is like, Hey, open source, no, bring in data bricks. I mean data bricks, open source, bring in this tool that too, now you are seeing snowflake capitulate a little bit. They announce, for instance, Apache iceberg support at their, at the snowflake summit. So they're tipping their cap to open source. But at the end of the day, they're gonna market and sell the fact that it's gonna run better in native snowflake. Whereas data bricks, they're coming at it from much more of an open source, a mantra. So that's gonna, you know, we'll see who look at, you had windows and you had apple, >>You got, they both want, you got Cal and you got Stanford. >>They both >>Consider, I don't think it's actually there yet. I, I find the more interesting dynamic right now is between AWS and snowflake. It's really a fun tit for tat, right? I mean, AWS has the S three and then, you know, snowflake comes right on top of it and announces R two, we're gonna do one letter, one number better than you. They just seem to have this really interesting dynamic. And I, and it is SLT and no one's betting against him. I mean, this guy's fantastic. So, and he hasn't used his war chest yet. He's still sitting on all that money that he raised to your point, that data bricks five, their timing just was a little off >>5 billion in >>Capital when Slootman hasn't used that money yet. So what's he gonna do? What can he do when he turns that on? He finds the right. >>They're making some acquisitions. They did the stream lit acquisitions stream. >>Fantastic >>Problem. With data bricks, their valuation is underwater. Yes. So they're recruiting and their MNAs. Yes. In the toilet, they cannot make the moves because they don't have the currency until they refactor the multiple, let the, this market settle. I I'm, I'm really nervous that they have to over factor the >>Valuation. Having said that to your point, Eric, the lake house architecture is definitely gaining traction. When you talk to practitioners, they're all saying, yeah, we're building data lakes, we're building lake houses. You know, it's a much, much smaller market than the enterprise data warehouse. But nonetheless, when you talk to practitioners that are actually doing things like self serve data, they're building data lakes and you know, snow. I mean, data bricks is right there. And as a clear leader in, in ML and AI and they're ahead of snowflake, right. >>And I was gonna say, that's the thing with data bricks. You know, you're getting that analytics at M I built into it. >>You know, what's ironic is I remember talking to Matt Carroll, who's CEO of auDA like four or five years ago. He came into the office in ma bro. And we were in temporary space and we were talking about how there's this new workload emerging, which combines AWS for cloud infrastructure, snowflake for the simple data warehouse and data bricks for the ML AI, and then all now all of a sudden you see data bricks yeah. And snowflake going at it. I think, you know, to your point about the competition between AWS and snowflake, here's what I think, I think the Redshift team is, you know, doesn't like snowflake, right. But I think the EC two team loves it. Loves it. Exactly. So, so I think snowflake is driving a lot of, >>Yeah. To John's point, there is plenty to go around. And I think I saw just the other day, I saw somebody say less than 40% of true global 2000 organizations believe that they're at real time data analytics right now. They're not really there yet. Yeah. Think about how much runway is left and how many tools you need to get to real time streaming use cases. It's complex. It's not easy. >>It's gonna be a product value market to me, snowflake in data bricks. They're not going away. Right. They're winning architectures. Yeah. In the cloud, what data bricks did would spark and took over the Haddo market. Yeah. To your point. Now that big data, market's got two players, in my opinion, snow flicking data, bricks converging. Well, Redshift is sitting there behind the curtain, their wild card. Yeah. They're wild card, Dave. >>Okay. I'm gonna give one more wild card, which is the edge. Sure. Okay. And that's something that when you talk about real time analytics and AI referencing at the edge, there aren't a lot of database companies in a position to do that. You know, Amazon trying to put outposts out there. I think it runs RDS. I don't think it runs any other database. Right. Snowflake really doesn't have a strong edge strategy when I'm talking the far edge, the tiny edge. >>I think, I think that's gonna be HPE or Dell's gonna own the outpost market. >>I think you're right. I'll come back to that. Couch base is an interesting company to watch with Capella Mongo. DB really doesn't have a far edge strategy at this point, but couch base does. And that's one to watch. They're doing some really interesting things there. And I think >>That, but they have to leapfrog bongo in my >>Opinion. Yeah. But there's a new architecture emerging at the edge and it's gonna take a number of years to develop, but it could eventually from an economic standpoint, seep back into the enterprise arm base, low end, take a look at what couch base is >>Doing. They hired an Amazon guard system. They have to leapfrog though. They need to, they can't incrementally who's they who >>Couch >>Base needs to needs to make a big move in >>Leap frog. Well, think they're trying to, that's what Capella is all about was not only, you know, their version of Atlas bringing to the cloud couch base, but it's also stretching it out to the edge and bringing converged database analytics >>Real quick on the numbers. Any data on CloudFlare, >>I was, I've been sitting here trying to get the word CloudFlare out my mouth the whole time you guys were talking, >>Is this another that's innovated in the ecosystem. So >>Platform, it was really simple for them early on, right? They're gonna get that edge network out there and they're gonna steal share from Akamai. Then they started doing exactly what Akamai did. We're gonna start rolling out some security. Their security is fantastic. Maybe some practitioners are saying a little bit too much, cuz they're not focused on one thing or another, but they are doing extremely well. And now they're out there in the cloud as well. You >>Got S3 compare. They got two, they got an S3 competitor. >>Exactly. So when I'm listening to you guys talk about, you know, a, a couch base I'm like, wow, those two would just be an absolute fantastic, you know, combination between the two of them. You mean >>CloudFlare >>Couch base. Yeah. >>I mean you got S3 alternative, right? You got a Mongo alternative basically in my >>Opinion. And you're going and you got the edge and you got the edge >>Network with security security, interesting dynamic. This brings up the super cloud date. I wanna talk about Supercloud because we're seeing a trend on we're reporting this since last year that basically people don't have to spend the CapEx to be cloud scale. And you're seeing Amazon enable that, but snowflake has become a super cloud. They're on AWS. Now they're on Azure. Why not tan expansion expand the market? Why not get that? And then it'll be on Google next, all these marketplaces. So the emergence of this super cloud, and then the ability to make that across a substrate across multiple clouds is a strategy we're seeing. What do you, what do you think? >>Well, honestly, I'm gonna be really Frank here. The, everything I know about the super cloud I know from this guy. So I've been following his lead on this and I'm looking forward to you guys doing that conference and that summit coming up from a data perspective. I think what you're saying is spot on though, cuz those are the areas we're seeing expansion in without a doubt. >>I think, you know, when you talk about things like super cloud and you talk about things like metaverse, there's, there's a, there, there look every 15 or 20 years or so this industry reinvents itself and a new disruption comes out and you've got the internet, you've got the cloud, you've got an AI and VR layer. You've got, you've got machine intelligence. You've got now gaming. There's a new matrix, emerging, super cloud. Metaverse there's something happening out there here. That's not just your, your father's SAS or is or pass. Well, >>No, it's also the spend too. Right? So if I'm a company like say capital one or Goldman Sachs, my it spend has traditionally been massive every year. Yes. It's basically like tons of CapEx comes the cloud. It's an operating expense. Wait a minute, Amazon has all the CapEx. So I'm not gonna dial down my budget. I want a competitive advantage. So next thing they know they have a super cloud by default because they just pivoted their, it spend into new capabilities that they then can sell to the market in FinTech makes total sense. >>Right? They're building out a digital platform >>That would, that was not possible. Pre-cloud >>No, it wasn't cause you weren't gonna go put all that money into CapEx expenditure to build that out. Not knowing whether or not the market was there, but the scalability, the ability to spend, reduce and be flexible with it really changes that paradigm entire. >>So we're looking at this market now thinking about, okay, it might be Greenfield in every vertical. It might have a power law where you have a head of the long tail. That's a player like a capital one, an insurance. It could be Liberty mutual or mass mutual that has so much it and capital that they're now gonna scale it into a super cloud >>And they have data >>And they have the data tools >>And the tools. And they're gonna bring that to their constituents. Yes, yes. And scale it using >>Cloud. So that means they can then service the entire vertical as a service provider. >>And the industry cloud is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. I mean, that's really a way that people are delivering to market. So >>Remember in the early days of cloud, all the banks thought they could build their own cloud. Yeah. Yep. Well actually it's come full circle. They're like, we can actually build a cloud on top of the cloud. >>Right. And by the way, they can have a private cloud in their super cloud. Exactly. >>And you know, it's interesting cause we're talking about financial services insurance, all the people we know spend money in our macro survey. Do you know the, the sector that's spending the most right now? It's gonna shock you energy utilities. Oh yeah. I was gonna, the energy utilities industry right now is the one spending the most money I saw largely cuz they're playing ketchup. But also because they don't have these type of things for their consumers, they need the consumer app. They need to be able to do that delivery. They need to be able to do metrics. And they're the they're, they're the one spending right >>Now it's an arms race, but the, the vector shifts to value creation. So >>It's it just goes back to your post when it was a 2012, the trillion dollar baby. Yeah. It's a multi-trillion dollar baby that they, >>The world was going my chassis post on Forbes, headline trillion dollar baby 2012. You know, I should add it's happening. That's >>On the end. Yeah, exactly. >>Trillions of babies, Eric. Great to have you on the key. >>Thank you so much guys. >>Great to bring the data. Thanks for sharing. Check out ETR. If you're into the enterprise, want to know what's going on. They have a unique approach, very accurate in their survey data. They got a great market basket of, of, of, of, of data questions and people and community. Check it out. Thanks for coming on and sharing with. >>Thank you guys. Always enjoy. >>We'll be back with more coverage here in the cube in New York city live at summit 22. I'm John fur with Dave ante. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to New York City. Lisa Martin and John Furrier with theCUBE here live covering the AWS Summit NYC 2022. There's about 15 different summits going on this year, John, globally. We're here with about 10,000 attendees. Just finished the keynote and two guests from SoftwareONE. Please welcome David Torres, the director of cloud services and Asim Khan, a North American AWS services delivery lead at SoftwareONE. Welcome, guys. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Talk to us, David, kick us off. Give the audience an overview of SoftwareONE. What do you guys do? And then tell us a little bit about the AWS partnership. >> Sure, so SoftwareONE, we are one of Microsoft and VMware's largest resellers. We help customers with our IT asset management services, managing their on-premises license real estate, but we're definitely a company that's undergoing a transformation. And when I say that, essentially we're focused on three key pillars with our go to market, supporting the hyperscalers. So we do support AWS, Azure, GCP at modernization because we do see this with a lot of our customers, you know, they're moving from on premises to AWS. They have a lot of technical debt and they're looking at options to modernize that, and mission critical workloads like SAP, Windows, Oracle, and we offer, you know, a suite of professional services, managed services, migrations, quite quite a bit of services. >> Asim, can you kind of double click on the services that SoftwareONE delivers to customers? Maybe some key use cases? >> Yeah, sure. I think in the Amazon space, I would say we're currently focusing in the area of funding programs that Amazon currently has, for example, the Migration Acceleration Program, which is a map with supporting customers basically with the entire cloud journey that they might have, or helping them define that cloud journey. And then we can help the customer in any phase of that journey as well to basically take them a step step above. So that's what our area of focus is right now to basically help enable customers. >> So on the Microsoft, AWS, you mentioned Microsoft, I mean, they've had the enterprise business for years and, you know, developers was their, you know, ecosystem. Back in the day, "Developers, developers, developers" as Steve Ballmer once said, and that was their crown jewel. But then, you know, .NET now has Linux. They got a lot more open source. So those enterprises, their customers are changing. A lot of them are on AWS. So talk about that dynamic of the shift to AWS. And now that Azure's out there, what's the relationship of those hyperscale? How do you guys navigate those waters? >> Sure, I mean, it's always the concept of work backwards from the customer, right? What are the business outcomes they're trying to drive and, you know, define a strategy from that. And it's still a function of change management for a lot of customers, people, process and tools. So, you know, in a lot of cases, our customers are evaluating what's a skillset of our people, do we need to upskill them, the tools that we're using, how do we use those on the multiple clouds, right? And then the processes. So for us, you know, we have some customers that prefer one cloud over another. We have customers that run cross multiple clouds. They deploy different workloads. And then we have some customers that transformation and modernization are really big top of stack for them. So in some cases, those customers are going to AWS and, you know, we're helping them kind of with that journey. It's interesting, Amazon literally won the developer cloud market early on, going back 15 years. >> Absolutely. >> But not all developers, enterprise developers who, you know, in the enterprises, they're stuck in their ways, but are changing. This is a digital transformation moment 'cause cloud native applications, the modernization piece, is developer centric. >> Absolutely. >> That's key, the developers. So I'm interested in your perspective and reaction to what's going on in that developer market right now with DevOps exploding in a great way, the goodness of the cloud coming more and more to the table. >> Sure, no, absolutely, great question. So I think with enterprise developers, you know, we see just the businesses driving a lot of the outcomes, right? So the modernization aspect of needing to get to market faster, needing to deploy applications faster, having a more efficient operating model, more automation. And for your point on the .NET modernization, you know, we work with customers too as well. We made an acquisition a couple years ago, a company, InterGrupo. They actually specialize in this in .NET modernization. So we know we're seeing some customers that are moving to Linux, right? And they want to go .NET Core and, you know, they're kind of standardizing on Linux. So we kind of see a, you know, wide spectrum, but yeah, maybe. >> Where are your customer conversations as things have changed so much in accelerated dramatically in the last couple of years? >> Sure. >> Obviously we've talked about the developers, but talk to me about, you know, business imperatives for businesses in every industry to digitally transform, number one, to survive the last couple of years, but, two, to be at a competitive advantage. >> Sure, no, so I think with businesses, you know, obviously, 2017, innovation, 2022, it's a little bit different, right? There's obviously macro conditions, you have COVID. So, you know, we're seeing where customers are essentially really doing their due diligence, right, when they make their choices more than ever before. And they're trying to maximize, right, their spend and their ROI when they move to cloud and that involves, you know, the licensing advisory, what they can move, what they can modernize, migrations, and just the roadmap and what strategy. But what I see is, it's the business outcomes, what they're trying to drive, and, you know, we're seeing some trends too with maybe a more conservative segments like healthcare, public sector, right, utilities that they are really investing and moving towards the cloud. >> Asim, I got a question from Twitter, a DM, I want to ask. You guys are on the front line. So you see the customers, which is really great 'cause it's primary data. You guys are right there. And you're not biased. You work with whatever hyperscaler. So it's really good. So the question that came up was, "Can you ask them the following, 'What's going on in the data warehouse front, cloud warehouse front, you got Redshift competing with Synapse, Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery, and then you got Snowflake and Databricks out there?'" So you got this new data provider, but it's not a data warehouse. And you got data refactoring on AWS, for instance as well. So, you know, this whole new level of data analytics with how you're doing cloud data. And you call it a data warehouse, I guess for categorically, but it's really not a warehouse. It's a data lake and you got lake front foundation. What are you guys seeing on the front lines with customers as they try to squint through how to deal with the data and which cloud to work with? >> That is a good question. I mean, I've been in the industry a long time. I've worked for some major financial institutions as well and data or big data was big for that industry. (John chuckles) So I've seen how the trends have changed, but from our perspective, because we are an agnostic services company, as you mentioned, we basically can work with any hyperscaler, we initially see what the business needs are for the customer. If the customer is already, for example, using Amazon, we initially want to have the customer use native tooling available within that hyperscaler space. If the customer is open for us to give them any recommendations, of course, we look at the business needs. We look at what type of data is going to be stored. What the industry is. Based on all of those inputs is when we basically give the right recommendation, it could be a third party data warehousing solution. It could be an area one. It all depends on what the business needs of the customer are. >> So for example, and most companies do this they build on say AWS, who is one of the first big clouds. And then they go, "Hey, we got customers over there at Azure, that's Microsoft they got thousands and thousands of customers. Snowflake's done, and they have marketplaces as well." So you guys are kind of agnostic it sounds like. Whatever the architecture is on the stack that they choose. >> Correct, so that's what makes us special. I think we are one of those services companies which is quite unique in the industry. And I don't say that just because I work for SoftwareONE, (John chuckle) that is a fact that gives us a very unique perspective of giving the customer the right piece of advice because we've seen it all and we've done it all. So that's, I think what puts us unique and regarding technology, all the different hyperscalers, they might have a very similar backend technology stack, but what the front end services each hyperscaler is building are very unique. Amazon being the leader in this space, they've been ahead of the curb by a few years, they will always have certain solutions which are above the rest. So I mean, I've always been an Amazon person, so I'm slightly biased, but, hey, I mean, I'm not complaining about that. >> The good news is the customer has choices. >> Right, absolutely. And we do see customers that want to be agnostic, right, >> Yeah. >> With their technology choices. Actually, that's a good segue about our partnership with AWS. We recently signed a strategic collaboration agreement between both parties. So there's going to continue to be big investment from us, scaling out our professional services, our practice areas, and then also key focus area for a fin ops. >> Is that your number one area? >> It's one of the areas, yeah. >> Okay, what your top three practice areas? >> Top three, mission critical workloads. So enterprise workloads like SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, two, app modernization, and, three, definitely fin ops and the hyperscalers, right? Because we see a lot of customers that have already heavily adopted cloud, they're struggling with that cloud financial management aspect. >> So if they're struggling, what are some of the key business outcomes that they come to you, to SoftwareONE, and say, "Help us figure this out. We have to achieve A, B, C." >> Sure, so depending on the maturity of the customer and where they are in the journey, if they're already very heavily adopting cloud, you know, AWS or Azure, we see in a lot of cases that the customers are unsure if they're getting the most out of their cloud spend, and they're looking at their operations, and their governance, and, you know, they're coming to us and basically asking us, "Hey, we feel like our cloud spend is a little bit out of control. Can you help us?" And that's where we can come in, you know, provide the advice, the guidance, the advisory but also give them the tooling, right, to have visibility into their cloud spend and make those conditions. And we also offer a managed fin op service that will end to end do this for the customers to help to manage their resale, their invoicing, their marketplace buy, as well as their cloud spend. >> So obviously the engagement varies customer to customer. What's a typical timeframe? Like how long does it take you to really get in there with a customer, understand the direction they need to go, and create the right plan? >> Sure, again, comes back to the cloud journey. You know, if the customer is still, you know, very much on prem and maybe more, you know, conservative, it may start with licensing assessments just to give them an idea of what it would cost to move those workloads, right? Then it turns into migration modernization, you know, it can be an anywhere from one to six months, you know, of just consulting, right, to get the customer ready. And then we help 'em, you know, obviously with their migration plan. But if they're already heavily adopting cloud, you know, we do remediation work, we do optimization. Obviously, SAP, that's a longer cycle, so. (chuckles) >> So I got to ask you guys, what is the PyraCloud? SoftwareONE as a platform PyraCloud. What is that? >> I might want to answer that. >> Sure. (chuckles) >> It's pronounced PyraCloud. >> How do you pronounce it? >> PyraCloud. >> PyraCloud, okay. I like PyraCloud better. (chuckles) >> With the Y in there. It's basically our spend insight platform. It gives customers an a truly agnostic single pane of glass view into their entire cloud enterprise spend. What I mean by that is with a single login, the customer has access to looking at their enterprise spend on AWS, on Azure, as well as GCP. And in the future, of course, we're going to add other hyperscalers in there as well. Because of the single pin of glass view, the customer has a true or the customer leadership, or, for example, the CTO has a single pane of glass view into the entire spend. We allow the customer to basically have an enterprise level tagging strategy, which is across all the hyperscalers as well as then allowing a certain amount of automated cost management as well, which is again agnostic and enterprisewide. >> Can you share an example of a customer for whom you've given them this single pane of glass through PyraCloud, and by how much they've been able to reduce costs or optimize costs? >> Yes, mostly the customers who would be a very good fit for PyraCloud would be a slightly more mature customer who already has a large amount of spend, or who is already very mature in their different hyperscalers. And usually what we've seen once a customer is mature in the cloud over a certain period of time, controlling costs does become difficult, even though you might have automation in place, but to get to that automation, you have to go through a certain amount of time of basically things breaking and you fixing them. So this is where per cloud becomes very helpful to help control that. And building a strategy, which once in place is repetitive and helps you manage costs and spend in the cloud year after year then. >> One of the things I want to get your guys reaction before we wrap up is this show here has got 10,000 people which is a big number, post COVID, events are coming back but in the past five years, or six years, or seven years, since like 2015, a lot's changed. What's changed the most? Shared to the audience what you think is the biggest step function change that's happening right now? Is it that data's now prime time? Everyone's got a lot of data, hasn't figured out the consequences with it. Is it scale? Is it super cloud? Is it the ecosystem because this is not stopping ,the growth in the enterprise on the digital transformation is expanding, even though GDPs down, and gas prices are high, and inflation, this isn't stopping. Now, some of the unicorns might be impacted by the headwinds, the big overfunded valuations but not the ecosystem. What's changed? What's the big change? >> Well, I think what I see is this cloud is becoming the defacto operating model and customers are working backwards from that as their primary goal, right, to operate in the cloud. And as I mentioned before, they really are doing due diligence, right, to really understand the best approach for seeing kind of maybe some of the challenges other customers have had when they first moved to AWS, so. And I'm, you know, seeing industries that maybe five years ago, you know, were not about moving to cloud, like healthcare. I can tell you a lot of our healthcare customers, they're trying to get to cloud as fast as possible. >> It's a wake up call. >> It's a wake up call. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> Asim, what's your reaction? >> In my point of view with what's happened these last few years with a lot of companies having their employees work from home and being remotely, I think end user compute was one of the big booms which happened about two years ago. We support a lot of customer in that space as well. And then overall, I think we actually saw that there was much more business focus with employees working for home for some reason. And we saw that internally in our own organization as well. And with that focus, the whole area of being more lean and agile in the cloud space, I think became much more prevalent for all the enterprises. Everybody wanted to be spend conscious, availing the different tools available in the cloud arena, like autoscaling like using, for example, containerization, using such solutions to basically be more resilient and more lean to basic control costs. >> So necessity is the mother of all inventions >> It is. >> That got forced. So you got wake up call and then a forcing function to like, okay, but exposes the consequences of a modern application, modern environment because they didn't, they're out of business. So then it's like, okay, this is actually working, (chuckles) why don't we like kill that project that we've doubled down on, move it over here." So I see that same pattern. What do you guys see? >> Yeah, no, I mean, we see that pattern as well. Just modernization, efficiency. You could just move faster, more elasticity, you know, and, again, the wake up call, you know, for organizations that people couldn't go to data centers, right? (chuckles) >> Yeah. (chuckles) >> We actually have a customer, that was literally the reason they made the move, right, to AWS. >> And I would add one more thing to that particular point. With the time available, I think customers were able to actually now re-architect their applications slightly better to be able to avail, for example, no server type of solutions or using certain design principles which were much more cost lean in the cloud. That's what we saw. I think customers spent that time available over the past couple of years to be much more cloud centric, I would say. >> Yeah, the forced March was really an accelerant and a catalyst in a lot of ways for good, and there's definitely some silver linings there. Guys, we're out of time. But thank you so much for joining John >> Oh, awesome. >> And me talking about SoftwareONE, what you guys are doing, helping customers, what you're doing with AWS and the hyperscalers. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you. >> Awesome. Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Really appreciate it. >> All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from New York City at AWS Summit at NYC. Stick around, John and I will be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)

>>Good morning from New York city, Lisa Martin and John furrier with the cube. We are at AWS summit NYC. This is a series of summits this year, about 15 summit globally. And we're excited to be here, John, with about 10,000 folks. >>It's crowded. New York is packed big showing here at 80 of us summit. So it's super exciting, >>Super exciting. Just a little bit before the keynote. And we have our first guest, Kevin Farley joins us the director of strategic alliances at Maria DB. Kevin, welcome to >>The program. Thank you very much. Appreciate you guys having us. >>So all of us out from California to NYC. Yeah, lots of eyes. We got keynote with Warner Vogels coming up. We should be some good news, hopefully. Yep. But talk to us about Maria DB Skys cloud native version released a couple years ago. What's going on? >>Yeah, well, it's, you know, Skys SQL for us is really a be on the future. I think when we think about like the company's real mission is it's just creating a database for everyone. It's it's any cloud, any scale, um, any size of performance and really making sure that we're able to deliver on something that really kind of takes advantage of everything we've done in the market to date. If you think about it, there's not very many startups that have a billion downloads and 75% of the fortune 500 already using our service. So what we're really thinking about is how do we bridge that gap? How do we create a natural path for all of these customers? And if you think about not just Maria DB, but anyone else using the sequel query language, all the, my people, what I think most Andy jazzy TK, anyone says, you know, it's about 10% of the market currently is in the clouds. That's 90% of a total addressable market that hasn't done it yet. So creating cloud modernization for us, I think is just a huge opportunity. Do >>You guys have a great history with AWS? I want to just step back, you mentioned some stats on, on success. Can you scope the size and track record of Maria DB for us real quick and set the table? Because I think there's a bigger picture going on that we've been tracking for the past 13 years we address is the role of the database has always been one of those things where they didn't believe a one database fits all things, right. You guys have been part of that track record scope, the size and scale of Maria DB, the usage, the use cases and some of the successes. >>Yeah. I mean, like I said, some of the stats are already threw out there. So, you know, it is pervasive, I think is the best way to put it. I think what you look at what the database market really became is very siloed. Right? I think there was a lot of unique solutions that were built and delivered that had promise, but they also had compromise. And I think once you look at the landscape of a lot of fortune 500 companies, they have probably 10 to 15 different database solutions, right? And they're all doing unique things. They're difficult to manage. They're very costly. So what Marie DB is always kind of focused on is how do we continue to build more and more functionality into the database itself and allow that to be a single source of truth where application developers can seamlessly integrate applications. >>So then the theme of this event in New York city, which is scale dot, dot, dot, anything must align quite well with Maria and your >>Objectives. I mean, honestly, I think when I think of the problems that most database, um, companies, um, face customers, I should say it, it really comes down to performance and scale. Most of them like Maria DB, like you said, they it's like the car, you know, and love you've been driving it for years. You're an expert at it. It works great, but it doesn't have enough range. It doesn't go fast enough. It's hitting walls. That modern data requirements are just breaking. So scale for me is the favorite thing to talk about because what we launched as MariaDB expand, which is a plugable storage engine that is integrated into Skye, and it really gives you dynamic scale. So you can scale in, you can scale out, it's not costly compute to try to get for seasonality. So you can make your black Friday numbers. It's really about the dexterity to be able to come in and out as you need in a share, nothing architecture with full failover sale healing, high availability, married to the cloud for full cloud scale. And that's really the beauty of the AWS partnership. >>Can you elaborate a bit more on the partnership? How long have you guys been partners? Where is it now anything exciting coming out? >>Yeah, it it's, it's actually been a wonderful ride. They've really invested from the very beginning we went for the satisfactory. So they really brought a lot of resources to bear. And I think if you're looking at why it works, um, it's probably two things. I think the number one thing is that we share one of the core tenants and it's customer obsession in a, in a, in an environment where there is co-opetition right. You have to find paths for how do you get the best thing for the customer? And the second is pretty obvious, but if you look at any major cloud, their number one priority is getting large mission critical workloads into their cloud because the revenue is exponential on the backside. So what do we own? Large mission critical workloads. So if you marry that objective with AWS, the partnership is absolutely perfect for driving true revenue, growth scale, and, and revenue across, across both entities in the partner ecosystem. >>So Kevin talk about the, um, the hybrid strategy, cuz you're seeing cloud operations. Yep. Go hybrid. Amazon announced AWS announced outpost like four years ago. Right now edge is super hot. Yeah. So you're seeing like most of the enterprise is saying mm-hmm <affirmative> okay. Love cloud love the cloud database, but I got the on-prem hybrid cloud operations. Right. So it's not just proprietary operations. It's cloud ops. Yeah. How do you guys fit into that? What's the story. >>We, we actually it's. I mean, there's, there's all these new deliverables outposts, you know, come out with a promise. What we have is a reality right now, um, one of the largest, um, networking companies, which I can't mention yet publicly, um, we want a really big sky SQL deal, but what they had manufacturing plants, they needed to have on-prem deployments. So Maria DB naturally syncs with sky SQL. It's the same technology. It works in perfect harmony. So we really already deliver on the promise of hybrid, but of course there's a lot more we can grow in that area. And certainly thinking about app posts and other solutions, um, is definitely on the, the longer term roadmap of what could make sense for in our customer. What, >>What are some of the latest things that, that you guys are doing now that you weren't doing a few years ago that customers should know about the audience should know about? >>I mean, I think the game changer, we're always innovating. I mean, when you're the company that writes the code owns the code, you know, we can do hot fixes, we can do security patches, we can always do the things that give you real time access to what you need. But I think the game changer is what I mentioned a little bit earlier. And I think it's really the, the holy grail of the cloud. It's like, how can we take the, the SQL query language, which is well over 50% of the open source market. Right. And how do we convert that seamlessly into the cloud? How do we help you modernize on that journey? And expand gives you the ability to say, I can be the small, I can be a small startup. I got my C round. I don't wanna manage databases. I can use the exact same service as the largest fortune 100 company that has massive global scale and needs to be able to drive that across globe. Yeah. So I think that's the beauty is that it's really a democratization of the database, >>At least that, you know, we've been covering the big data space for 10 years. Remember all those different conversations had do those days and oh, they have big data and right. But then it's like too hard to set up. Then you had that kind of period where you saw a spark and data lakes emerge. Yeah. Then you, now it almost seems, seems like now more than ever, there's a data revolutions back. Right. It was almost like a lull in the, in, in the, in the market a little bit. Yeah. I'm gonna democratize data science right now. You got data. So now it just seems to be an explosion at that level. What's your analysis on that? Because you you've been in, in, in the weeds and in the, in the, in this market for 10 years. Yeah. And nothing really changed. It's just now it's more ready. Yeah. I think what's your observation. Why >>Is that? I think that's a really good question. And I love it cuz I mean, what the promise of things like could do and net new technologies sort of, it was always out there, but it required this whole net new lift and how do I do it? How do I manage it? How do I optimize it? The beauty of what we can do with Maria DB is that sky SQLs, which you already know and love. Right? And now we can Del you can deliver a data lake on S3, right? You can pull that data. And we also have the ability to do both analytical data and transactional data from the same database. So you can write applications that can pull column, store data up into, um, your application, but you can also have all of your asset transactions, which are absolutely required for all of your mission critical business. So I think that we're seeing more and more adoption. You've seen other companies start to talk about bringing the different elements in, but we're the only ones that really >>Do it and SQL standardizing that front end. Yeah. Even better than ever before. All the stuff under the covers is all being connected. >>That's the awesome part is right. Is you're literally doing what you already know how to do, but you blow it out on the back end, married to the cloud. And that I think is the real revolution of what makes usability real in the data space. And I think that's what was always the problem before >>When you're in partner conversations, you mentioned co-opetition. Yeah. <laugh> so I think when you're in partner conversations and customer conversations, there is a lot of the, the there's a lot of competition out there. Absolutely. Everyone's got their own key messages. What are the key differentiators that you're saying AWS Marie to be together better? And here's why, >>Yeah. I, I think that certainly you, you start with the global footprint of AWS, right? So what we rely on the most is having the ability to truly deal with global customers in availability zones, they're gonna optimize performance from them. But then when we look at what we do that really changes the game, it comes down to scale and performance. We actually just ran, um, a suspense test against cockroach that also does distributed sequel. Absolutely. You know, the results were off the chart. So we went public and said, we have an open challenge. Anyone that wants to try to beat, um, expand and Skye will we'll if you can, we'll put $25,000 towards charity. So we really are putting our money where our mouth is on that challenge. So we believe the performance cuz we've seen it and we know it's real, but then it's really always about data scale. Modern data requirements are breaking the mold of charting. They're breaking the mold of all these bandaids that people have put in these traditional services. And we give them future. We, we feature proof their investments, so they can say, Hey, I can start here. But if I end up being a startup that becomes Airbnb, I'm already built to blow it out on the back end. I can already use what I have. >>Speaking of startups, being the next Airbnb. If you look at behind us here, you can see, this is a really packed event in New York city events are back, but the ecosystem here is even flourishing. So Dave and I and Lisa were observing that we're still kind of in a growth mode, big time. So yeah, there's some market forces headwinds for the big unicorns, overfunded, you know, public companies, maybe the valuations are a little bit off, but there's still a surge of new innovations, new companies coming out of this. Um, and it's all around data and scale. It's all around new names. We've never heard of. Absolutely. What's your take on >>Reaction? Well, actually another awesome segues cuz in addition to the public clouds, I manage the ecosystem. And one of the things that we've really been focused on with Skys SQL is making it accessible API accessible. So if you're a company that has a huge Marine DB footprint change data capture might be the most important thing for you to say, we wanna do this, but we want you to stay in sync with our environments. Um, things like monitoring, things like BI, all of these are ecosystem plays and current partners that we have, um, that we really think about how do you holistically look at not only the database and what it can do, but how does it deliver value to different segments of your customer base or just your employee base that are using that stuff? So I think that's huge for us. >>Well, you know, one of the things that we talk often about is that every company, these days, regardless of industry, has to be a data company. Yep. You've gotta be able to access the data glean insights from an act on it quickly, whether it's manufacturing, retail, healthcare, are there any verticals in where Maria DB really excels? >>Um, so certainly we Excel in areas like financial services is huge DBS bank. Um, in APAC, one of our biggest customers, also one of the largest Oracle migrations, probably the, that we've ever done. A lot of people trying to get off Oracle, we make it seamless to get into Maria DB. Um, you can think about Samsung cloud and another, their entire consumer cloud is built on Maria DB, why it's integrated with expand right seasonality. So there's customers like that that really bring it home for us as far as ServiceNow tech sector. Right? So these are all different ones, but I think we're really strong in those >>Areas. So this brings up a good point. Dave and I a coined a term called super cloud at reinvent and Lisa and Dave were at multiple events we're together at events. And so a lot of people are getting behind this cuz it's multi-cloud sounds like something's broken. Yes. But so we call it super cloud because customers are building on top of ecosystems like Maria DB and others. Yeah. Not just AWS SOS does all the CapEx absolutely provide the value. So now people are having this new super cloud moment. We' saying we can get all the benefits of cloud scale mm-hmm <affirmative> without actually being a cloud. Right. So this is where the next gen layer comes. What's your reaction to, to super cloud. Do you think it's a thing? >>Well, I think it's a thing in the sense, from our perspective as an ISV, we're, we're laser focused on making sure that we support any cloud and we have a truly multicloud cloud platform. But the beauty of that as well is from a single UI, you're able to deploy databases in different clouds underneath that you're not looking at so you can have performance proximity, but you're still driving it through the same Skys UI. So for us it's, it's unequivocally true. Got it. And I think it's only ISVs like Maria DB that can deliver on that value because >>You're enabling, >>We're enabling it. Right. We partner, we build on top of everything. Right. So we can access everything underneath >>And they can then build on top of you. >>Sure, exactly. And that's exactly where it goes. Right? Yeah. So that, I think in that sense, the super cloud is actually already somewhat real. >>It's interesting. You look at the old, it spend, you take a big company. I won't say a name, but a leader in a, a vertical, they have such a big spend. Now they can leverage that spend in with the super cloud model. They then could become a service provider in the vertical. Absolutely capital one S doing it. Yeah. You're seeing, um, Goldman Sachs doing it. They have the power on the spend that they're leveraging in for their business and servicing their vertical and the smaller players. Do you see that trend? >>Well, I think that's the reality is that everyone is getting this place where if you're talking about sort of this broader super concept, you're talking about global scale, right? That's if in order to deliver a backbone that can service that model, you have to have the right data structure and the right database footprint to be able to scale. And I think that's what they all need to be able to do. And that's what we're really well positioned with Skys >>To enable companies, as we talked about a minute ago to truly become data companies. Yeah. And to be competitive and to scale on their own, where are your customer conversations? Are they at the C-suite level? Has that changed in the last couple of years? >>Uh, that's actually a really great way to state that question because I think you would've traditionally probably talked more to, um, the DBAs, right? They're the people that are having headaches. They're having problems. They're, they're trying to solve. We see a lot of developers now tons, right? They're thinking about, I have this, I have this new thing that I need to do to deliver this new application. And here's the requirements and the current model's broken. It doesn't optimize that it's a lot of work and it's hard to manage. So I think that we're in a great position to be able to take that to that next phase and deliver. And then of course, as you get deeper in with AWS, you're talking about, you know, CIO level, CISO level, they're they need to understand how do you fit into our larger paradigm. And many of these guys have, you know, hundreds of million dollar commits with AWS. So they think of their investment in the sense of the cloud stack. And we're part of that cloud stack, just like AWS services. So those conversations continue to happen certainly with our larger customers, cuz it truly is married. >>It is. And they continue to evolve. Kevin, thank you so much >>For joining. You're welcome. Great, >>John and me talking about what's going on with Maria >>D. Thank you, John. Thank you, Lisa. On behalf of Maria B, it was wonderful. Really >>Appreciate it. Fantastic as well for John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from New York city at AWS summit NYC, John and I we're back with our next guest in a minute.

(gentle music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to New York City. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here with theCUBE, covering AWS Summit NYC. This is a series of summits this year. There's about 15 of them globally. We are excited to be here with a couple of guests. We have an alumni back with us. Couple of guests from Caylent, Stephen Garden joins us, the Executive Chairman, and Valerie Henderson, Chief Revenue Officer. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Thank you for having us. >> Great to have you, welcome back. >> Appreciate it, from 2016. >> 2016, it's been a minute. >> Yep. >> But that was before Caylent. Talk to us about Caylent, what do you guys do? What do you deliver? How are you affiliated with AWS? >> Sure, so we were founded in 2015, initially as a container management product. So our roots are very deeply centered around Cloud native. We've since evolved and become a Cloud native consultancy. We're all in with AWS. We were actually just awarded AWS Premier Partner a couple of weeks ago, so we're pretty pumped about that, but we're about 250 people now, across North and South America. And our goal is really to work with customers that are looking to innovate and evolve and use AWS as a catalyst to build new products for their business. >> As a catalyst, I like that. Valerie, talk about the customer. Obviously so much tumbled in the last couple of years. Still going through it. >> Yeah, of course. >> How have customer conversations evolved and changed in the last couple of years, from your perspective? >> Yeah, I think from my perspective it is such a unique time and it's a time that is constantly changing. And I think change breeds opportunity, and I feel like customers see that, and they're leaning in. They want the opportunity to create new revenue streams, do more, more efficiently, and I think that's the key. And the questions are really asking, how can we take our data, and turn it into something that we can monetize? How can we be smarter with what we have? And I think it's an incredible time to be in the space that we're in. Every conversation I have is really forward thinking, and about the business. And I've been in this space for a while, and that was not always that case. And I think now people are shifting that IT shop to IP shop, and that's so key, from my perspective. >> Interesting, interesting shift there. Every company has to be a data company these days, to be competitive, the last couple of years it was, how did we survive? Pivot, pivot, pivot. But to be a data company, means you have to be able to extract the value and insights from that data and act on it, to your point, develop new products, new revenue streams, new opportunities. How do you enable companies, and maybe this is a question that you can both answer, to truly become data companies? >> The whole model from a service's perspective is not a do-for model, it is a do-with model. And any time we go into a customer, it's like, where are they on the curve? From monolith application, to microservices, where do they sit today? And I think when you dig in, you assess, you deeply understand where they are, you can get them to where they want to be, and build a plan. And the way our model works is, we're doing it with them, and what that means is we're enabling them, documentation, we're supporting them, that if we're not there, they're going to be able to carry it forward and continue to do more. So, that's so so important. I'd love Stephen's take on it. >> Yeah, I think the other trend that we're seeing in data more recently is that customers need to share their information with other partners, collaborate. And AWS is just the perfect platform to be able to do that, enable that sharing. And you're seeing even businesses like Snowflake build a data Cloud on top of AWS. So, I think that's a new angle that we're seeing which is really bringing together way more innovation- >> What about that data clean-room trend that's going on, Snowflake's doing a lot of that. But some of them have a little lock in spec there, versus being open, security, privacy, governance, what's the balance between open sharing and the requirements you need to be secure and compliant? >> Yeah, I think very simplistically, the information that you are using to deliver your product and service to customers generally safer, more public and available, the information that's confidential to your business behind the scenes, obviously, you use the right protocols to lock it out. But it is a very hot topic in today's world, especially with Web3 and people seeking to get their information back, so... >> So you mentioned you guys around since 2015, if you go back in time, it seems like yesterday, but Cloud time, it's like two generations ago. Why is data now more relevant? Is it because the technology's gotten better and easier, or more maturization of the client's understanding, or being full with data, having a data problem and hence an opportunity? Or is it open source has evolved? Or all three, what's your reaction to that? Why is it exploding now when it's been around for a while? >> It keeps exponentially growing, right? The more and more data. There was a stat four or five years ago about, hey, we're taking more photographs in a single year now than all of mankind, leading up to that date, but I think just the sheer quantities and the way people are managing it now, and being able to actually capture information points of everything across their entire business, just presents a much bigger opportunity to be able to take and form decisions of the back of that. >> So do you see the customers having more data full problems, that they're having more data? So that's... And in that one >> 100%. >> Of the consequences of not leveraging it? >> Yeah, it's what to do. Yeah, absolutely, and if you think about when you wake up in the morning if you ask Alexa what the weather is, and like, you're creating data, in every engagement with the world. So I think it's this explosion of it, but then it exists, and what do you do, and having a strategy. I still think one of the biggest gaps is people, and talent, and expertise to do the work, frankly. Which is, the hypothesis of Caylent existing. >> Yeah, I think a data concept and application, because what's the weather to Alexa, is an application of what's the weather, it's a request, but it's actually the data's built into the app. >> It's built in. >> So data as code is a new trend. >> Yes, yeah, yeah, and I think it's funny to answer the question. There's more data points surrounding how to leverage your data, and I'm like, it's crazy, I think you're really seeing that working- >> We have an old data warehouse, we can't get the weather data, although it's there somewhere. But that's the problem. Getting the data, in the applications, this is not... Wasn't around 10 years ago. No one was talking like that. Now it's more standard. That sounds like DevOps to me, a DevOps problem. >> Yeah, moving from the monolithic to the microservice is wild, and just the way that people are building applications today. The users, their customers are demanding more from the service, and AWS is able to deliver that. >> What are some of your customers doing with you guys, can you give some examples and scope the scale of your relationship with the customers, vis-a-vis AWS and the Cloud, how they're using you guys and the Cloud. >> Yeah, yeah, for sure, a customer of ours, Allergen, which is an incredible organization, really had a large effort to modernize. And they actually have a data lab within their company called Allergen Data Labs, and they leveraged us to truly just modernize this containerization effort. How they can do more with less, and that serverless experience. So, I think from my perspective what we're seeing is also a need to be thoughtful about DevOps retooling and tooling because talent wants to work with the best toolset, the hottest stuff on the street, and again, to keep talent is key, in any organization's success. >> Valerie, how does Caylent help with that from a talent perspective? Obviously there's talent shortage, we're also still in the great resignation. >> Oh my gosh. >> How do you help organizations bridge the gap so that they can glean insights from data and be competitive and win? >> Yeah, we actually just published a case study with Novus which was bought by SEI, which is a huge financial firm. Where they said, "Listen, it's human nature to say I have a gap, and I need to fill it, I'm going to hire somebody." That's human nature to say, okay, this is what we're going to do. But the reality is, I think companies are starting to see the advantage of using a partner and say, okay, I could hire one person or I could bring in a partner who's going to have a team of five, works incrementally for a period of time, does with, helps coach my team up, document all of that, and I think that they're seeing value from that. And ultimately, it's not that we don't want them to eventually hire. When they do hire, we want that person to come in and have the best experience. >> And sometimes the people aren't even available, right? >> Correct, yeah. >> So you have a combination of managed services, a plethora of managed services that are also involved with the customers. So, it's that integration, scale, and partnering and sharing. You mentioned sharing data earlier, how do you guys view that integration piece, 'cause if you have a modern architecture, you got to have that decomposed, decoupled but integrated approach. >> Yeah, we really believe that the whole world of project services and managed services is coming together as one. So we have a single delivery model which we're really passionate about. And we look at it as an embedded team within our customers, embedded DevOps to support them, basically on anything that could be from a modernizing a new application through to addressing a more traditional Cloud architecture framework that's in place. But yeah, the trick to it is, as Val said earlier is the do with approach, not just do for, right? I think customers need to learn about the Cloud. They need to understand the technology that they're using. They want to have that understanding. And we found a way of fitting in our services to help them accelerate that part. >> So Valerie, I got to ask you the question. So, in sports you talk about the modern era of baseball or whatever, we're in the modern era of Cloud, going next generation. We call it Super Cloud, a concept that Dave and I put out at re:Invent. If someone asks you, what does the modern era look like? As you look at your customer base and the data you guys have, how would you describe this modern era? What is it made up of? Is it outcomes versus solutions? Is it technology that's decentralized? How do you talk about it? What is the modern era, if you were- >> Not to oversimplify it, but I'm going to, the idea that somebody could come into work and all they have to think about is business outcomes and the data points that they need to achieve said business outcomes. I'm the biggest fan of measure what matters, I think it is an incredibly powerful methodology. And I think anybody who thinks about running business, they know that it's a scale. The amount of companies that are in that place is very small right now. So I think modern era is really that running an IT company to an IP company. >> So Stephen, if you unpack that, what's under the covers to make that happen? Automation, machines, what's your assessment of that outcome, which by the way was well said. Beautiful, beautiful comment. What makes that happen? >> I think it is around automation. It is around do once and then apply many times. That is key. Obviously it's a fundamental principle of the Cloud, is that consistency in that repeatability. So when you can simplify services down to a point, click, deploy, I think you're in a much better position to be able to move quickly and then not have to worry about anything under the hood and just focus, like Val said, on the business outcomes. >> That's more creative. They're focusing on the problems, to not do the rock fetches and the heavy lifting that's not differentiated. >> I find that what gives people energy generates opportunity. And I think when people hit those roadblocks of, these things don't work together. There's all these interdependencies. It's really challenging. So I love what's happening. I think there's never been a better time to be in this business. >> Not a dull moment, That's for darn sure. >> Not a dull moment. >> Valerie, talk about outcomes. You mentioned a couple of customers that you're working with, some case studies. It is all about outcomes these days. That's the conversations that we have with the entire ecosystem is all about business outcomes. What are some of those key transformative business outcomes that Caylent is helping customers to achieve? >> Yeah, to me one thing that is key is, anytime I'm meeting with a customer, I want to understand who their customers are. I'm like, who is your customer? And how can we create a better experience for that customer. Whether it's their end users or their external customers. And I think that is a huge element. What we're seeing is that sassification of, how do I make it easier for my customers to procure and engage with my platform? And a lot of what we're doing right now is helping clients with that. And it's not a flip of a switch, it's not a click of a button, it's complicated. But that is what we are here to help, help simplify, help create that understanding of what's possible. >> How do you guys talk to your customers, take a minute to give a plug for the company. What are you looking for? What's the stats? How many employees you guys hiring, and what's the pitch to customers? >> Yeah, so I think every organization is on their journey to the Cloud now. It's gotten to that point where if you're not working with a public Cloud provider, you're part of a very, very small group. We like to say that we'll meet customers where they are, and help evolve them as a business, help evolve their teams. And that's what we mean when we say do with, so it's a pretty broad spectrum. We're big in healthcare. We're big in FinTech. We've worked with a lot of startup customers. We have about 250 customers today, 250 employees. And we're scaling rapidly. We've grown that from about 50 employees a year ago. >> Oh, wow. >> Yes, when I started, we were just around 60 people and we're at 260 today. >> And why are people working with you? What are you guys, solving a problem? Are you enabling them? What's the pitch? >> Without a doubt, I love that. Being in sales my whole career, somebody asking me for a pitch is my favorite. >> Okay, let's go. >> Yeah, yeah, the true value prop of what we do is all of the above. We enable, we help customers do more faster, but again, we do not want customers to walk away from an engagement with us saying, oh no, we don't know what to do. We want them to feel empowered. I still think the biggest gap from everything being in that IP business outcome is people. And for us, we're so passionate about that, and building a company that really truly believes that. And that's part of who we are as a company and our value system. >> And the digital transformation, ultimately what they're going through, you get them there faster. They get the outcomes and they're operational. >> Absolutely, and also to be clear, when a customer has a great experience working with you, they want to tell other people about the experience. And for us, like the referrals that we get, the partnership with Amazon is so key. >> What are some reactions after you go through an engagement? We've been riffing on this concept of Super Cloud where you're starting to see people build on top of, not the AWSs, but their partners that work with them. And so the customers are getting their own Cloud experience at scale. What are some of the comments you hear from your successful customers? What are some anecdotal feedback? >> Yeah, yeah. >> I'm so glad we did this because now I'm selling more, I'm doing this, what are some of the things that they're thinking? >> Yeah, yeah, I think ultimately the consistent theme that we get is, "I'm so glad that I didn't let fear hold me back from engaging a partner," because a lack of control scares a lot of customers. It does. And I think customers that are willing to say, "Okay, I'm going to have a little faith, trust in the process." They thank us. They do, and we've seen that across the board. I think that crossing that chasm is not to be underestimated without a doubt. >> Great story, congratulations. >> Oh, thank you. >> Well, there's nothing more powerful and potent than the voice of the customer. >> Without a doubt. And really you have to listen. >> Yes, yes, definitely. Stephen, Valerie, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program today, talking about Caylent, what you guys are doing for customers with AWS, empowering, enabling, collaboration. I love it, thank you. >> Yeah, thank you both. >> All right, our pleasure. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live in New York City, we are at AWSO in NYC, John and I will be right back with our next guest. (gentle music)

>> Is and who we are today as as a country, as a universe. >> Narrator: Congratulations Reggie Jackson, (inspirational music) you are a CUBE alumni. (upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Splunk.Conf19. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Okay, welcome back everyone it's theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Splunk.Conf19. I am John Furrier host of theCUBE. It's the 10th Anniversary of Splunk's .Conf user conference. Our 7th year covering it. It's been quite a ride, what a wave. Splunk keeps getting stronger and better, adding more features, and has really become a powerhouse from a third party security standpoint. We got a C-SO in theCUBE on theCUBE today. Chief Information Security, John Frushour Deputy Chief (mumbles) New York-Presbyterian The Award Winner from the Data to Everywhere Award winner, welcome by theCube. >> Thank you, thank you. >> So first of all, what is the award that you won? I missed the keynotes, I was working on a story this morning. >> Frushour: Sure, sure. >> What's the award? >> Yeah, the Data Everything award is really celebrating using Splunk kind of outside its traditional use case, you know I'm a security professional. We use Splunk. We're a Splunk Enterprise Security customer. That's kind of our daily duty. That's our primary use case for Splunk, but you know, New York Presbyterian developed the system to track narcotic diversion. We call it our medication analytics platform and we're using Splunk to track opioid diversion, slash narcotic diversions, same term, across our enterprise. So, looking for improper prescription usage, over prescription, under prescription, prescribing for deceased patients, prescribing for patients that you've never seen before, superman problems like taking one pill out of the drawer every time for the last thirty times to build up a stash. You know, not resupplying a cabinet when you should have thirty pills and you only see fifteen. What happened there? Everything's data. It's data everything. And so we use this data to try to solve this problem. >> So that's (mumbles) that's great usage we'll find the drugs, I'm going to work hard for it. But that's just an insider threat kind of concept. >> Frushour: Absolutely. >> As a C-SO, you know, security's obviously paramount. What's changed the most? 'Cause look at, I mean, just looking at Splunk over the past seven years, log files, now you got cloud native tracing, all the KPI's, >> Frushour: Sure. >> You now have massive volumes of data coming in. You got core business operations with IOT things all instrumental. >> Sure, sure. >> As a security offer, that's a pretty big surface area. >> Yeah. >> How do you look at that? What's your philosophy on that? >> You know, a lot of what we do, and my boss, the C-SO (mumbles) we look at is endpoint protection and really driving down to that smaller element of what we complete and control. I mean, ten, fifteen years ago information security was all about perimeter control, so you've got firewalls, defense and depth models. I have a firewall, I have a proxy, I have an endpoint solution, I have an AV, I have some type of data redaction capability, data masking, data labeling capability, and I think we've seen.. I don't think security's changed. I hear a lot of people say, "Oh, well, information security's so much different nowadays." No, you know, I'm a military guy. I don't think anything's changed, I think the target changed. And I think the target moved from the perimeter to the endpoint. And so we're very focused on user behavior. We're very focused on endpoint agents and what people are doing on their individual machines that could cause a risk. We're entitling and providing privilege to end users today that twenty years ago we would've never granted. You know, there was a few people with the keys to the kingdom, and inside the castle keep. Nowadays everybody's got an admin account and everybody's got some level of privilege. And it's the endpoint, it's the individual that we're most focused on, making sure that they're safe and they can operate effectively in hospitals. >> Interviewer: What are some of the tactical things that have changed? Obviously, the endpoint obviously shifted, so some tactics have to change probably again. Operationally, you still got to solve the same problem: attacks, insider threats, etc. >> Frushour: Yeah. >> What are the tactics? What new tactics have emerged that are critical to you guys? >> Yeah, that's a tough question, I mean has really anything changed? Is the game really the game? Is the con really the same con? You look at, you know, titans of security and think about guys like Kevin Mitnick that pioneered, you know, social engineering and this sort of stuff, and really... It's really just convincing a human to do something that they shouldn't do, right? >> Interviewer: Yeah. >> I mean you can read all these books about phone freaking and going in and convincing the administrative assistant that you're just late for meeting and you need to get in through that special door to get in that special room, and bingo. Then you're in a Telco closet, and you know, you've got access. Nowadays, you don't have to walk into that same administrative assistant's desk and convince 'em that you're just late for the meeting. You can send a phishing email. So the tactics, I think, have changed to be more personal and more direct. The phishing emails, the spear phishing emails, I mean, we're a large healthcare institution. We get hit with those types of target attacks every day. They come via mobile device, They come via the phishing emails. Look at the Google Play store. Just, I think, in the last month has had two apps that have had some type of backdoor or malicious content in them that got through the app store and got onto people's phones. We had to pull that off people's phones, which wasn't pretty. >> Interviewer: Yeah. >> But I think it's the same game. It's the same kind to convince humans to do stuff that they're not supposed to do. But the delivery mechanism, the tactical delivery's changed. >> Interviewer: How is Splunk involved? Cause I've always been a big fan of Splunk. People who know me know that I've pretty much been a fan boy. The way they handle large amounts of data, log files, (mumbles) >> Frushour: Sure. >> and then expand out into other areas. People love to use Splunk to bring in their data, and to bring it into, I hate to use the word data leg but I mean, Just getting... >> Yeah >> the control of the data. How is data used now in your world? Because you got a lot of things going on. You got healthcare, IOT, people. >> Frushour: Sure, sure. >> I mean lives are on the line. >> Frushour: Lives are on the line, yeah. >> And there's things you got to be aware of and data's key. What is your approach? >> Well first I'm going to shamelessly plug a quote I heard from (mumbles) this week, who leads the security practice. She said that data is the oxygen of AI, and I just, I love that quote. I think that's just a fantastic line. Data's the oxygen of AI. I wish I'd come up with it myself, but now I owe her a royalty fee. I think you could probably extend that and say data is the lifeline of Splunk. So, if you think about a use case like our medication analytics platform, we're bringing in data sources from our time clock system, our multi-factor authentication system, our remote access desktop system. Logs from our electronic medical records system, Logs from the cabinets that hold the narcotics that every time you open the door, you know, a log then is created. So, we're bringing in kind of everything that you would need to see. Aside from doing something with actual video cameras and tracking people in some augmented reality matrix whatever, we've got all the data sources to really pin down all the data that we need to pin down, "Okay, Nurse Sally, you know, you opened that cabinet on that day on your shift after you authenticated and pulled out this much Oxy and distributed it to this patient." I mean, we have a full picture and chain of everything. >> Full supply chain of everything. >> We can see everything that happens and with every new data source that's out there, the beauty of Splunk is you just add it to Splunk. I mean, the Splunk handles structured and unstructured data. Splunk handles cis log fees and JSON fees, and there's, I mean there's just, it doesn't matter You can just add that stream to Splunk, enrich those events that were reported today. We have another solution which we call the privacy platform. Really built for our privacy team. And in that scenario, kind of the same data sets. We're looking at time cards, we're looking at authentication, we're looking at access and you visited this website via this proxy on this day, but the information from the EMR is very critical because we're watching for people that open patient records when they're not supposed to. We're the number five hospital in the country. We're the number one hospital in the state of New York. We have a large (mumbles) of very important people that are our patients and people want to see those records. And so the privacy platform is designed to get audit trails for looking at all that stuff and saying, "Hey, Nurse Sally, we just saw that you looked at patient Billy's record. That's not good. Let's investigate." We have about thirty use cases for privacy. >> Interviewer: So it's not in context of what she's doing, that's where the data come in? >> That's where the data come in, I mean, it's advanced. Nurse Sally opens up the EMR and looks at patient Billy's record, maybe patient Billy wasn't on the chart, or patient Billy is a VIP, or patient Billy is, for whatever reason, not supposed to be on that docket for that nurse, on that schedule for that nurse, we're going to get an alarm. The privacy team's going to go, "Oh, well, were they supposed to look at that record?" I'm just giving you, kind of, like two or three uses cases, but there's about thirty of them. >> Yeah, sure, I mean, celebrities whether it's Donald Trump who probably went there at some point. Everyone wants to get his taxes and records to just general patient care. >> Just general patient care. Yeah, exactly, and the privacy of our patients is paramount. I mean, especially in this digital age where, like we talked about earlier, everyone's going after making a human do something silly, right? We want to ensure that our humans, our nurses, our best in class patient care professionals are not doing something with your record that they're not supposed to. >> Interviewer: Well John, I want to hear your thoughts on this story I did a couple weeks ago called the Industrial IOT Apocalypse: Now or Later? And the provocative story was simply trying to raise awareness that malware and spear phishing is just tactics for that. Endpoint is critical, obviously. >> Sure. >> You pointed that out, everyone kind of knows that . >> Sure. >> But until someone dies, until there's a catastrophe where you can take over physical equipment, whether it's a self-driving bus, >> Frushour: Yeah. >> Or go into a hospital and not just do ransom ware, >> Frushour: Absolutely. >> Actually using industrial equipment to kill people. >> Sure. >> Interviewer: To cause a lot of harm. >> Right. >> This is an industrial, kind of the hacking kind of mindset. There's a lot of conversations going on, not enough mainstream conversations, but some of the top people are talking about this. This is kind of a concern. What's your view on this? Is it something that needs to be talked about more of? Is it just BS? Should it be... Is there any signal there that's worth talking about around protecting the physical things that are attached to them? >> Oh, absolutely, I mean this is a huge, huge area of interest for us. Medical device security at New York Presbyterian, we have anywhere from about eighty to ninety thousand endpoints across the enterprise. Every ICU room in our organization has about seven to ten connected devices in the ICU room. From infusion pumps to intubation machines to heart rate monitors and SPO2 monitors, all this stuff. >> Interviewer: All IP and connected. >> All connected, right. The policy or the medium in which they're connected changes. Some are ZP and Bluetooth and hard line and WiFi, and we've got all these different protocols that they use to connect. We buy biomedical devices at volume, right? And biomedical devices have a long path towards FDA certification, so a lot of the time they're designed years before they're fielded. And when they're fielded, they come out and the device manufacturer says, "Alright, we've got this new widget. It's going to, you know, save lives, it's a great widget. It uses this protocol called TLS 1.0." And as a security professional I'm sitting there going, "Really?" Like, I'm not buying that but that's kind of the only game, that's the only widget that I can buy because that's the only widget that does that particular function and, you know, it was made. So, this is a huge problem for us is endpoint device security, ensuring there's no vulnerabilities, ensuring we're not increasing our risk profile by adding these devices to our network and endangering our patients. So it's a huge area. >> And also compatible to what you guys are thinking. Like I could imagine, like, why would you want a multi-threaded processor on a light bulb? >> Frushour: Yeah. >> I mean, scope it down, turn it on, turn it off. >> Frushour: Scope it down for its intended purpose, yeah, I mean, FDA certification is all about if the device performs its intended function. But, so we've, you know, we really leaned forward, our CSO has really leaned forward with initiatives like the S bomb. He's working closely with the FDA to develop kind of a set of baseline standards. Ports and protocols, software and services. It uses these libraries, It talks to these servers in this country. And then we have this portfolio that a security professional would say, "Okay, I accept that risk. That's okay, I'll put that on my network moving on." But this is absolutely a huge area of concern for us, and as we get more connected we are very, very leaning forward on telehealth and delivering a great patient experience from a mobile device, a phone, a tablet. That type of delivery mechanism spawns all kinds of privacy concerns, and inter-operability concerns with protocol. >> What's protected. >> Exactly. >> That's good, I love to follow up with you on that. Something we can double down on. But while we're here this morning I want to get back to data. >> Frushour: Sure. >> Thank you, by the way, for sharing that insight. Something I think's really important, industrial IOT protection. Diverse data is really feeds a lot of great machine learning. You're only as good as your next blind spot, right? And when you're doing pattern recognition by using data. >> Frushour: Absolutely. >> So data is data, right? You know, telecraft, other data. Mixing data could actually be a good thing. >> Frushour: Sure, sure. >> Most professionals would agree to that. How do you look at diverse data? Because in healthcare there's two schools of thought. There's the old, HIPAA. "We don't share anything." That client privacy, you mentioned that, to full sharing to get the maximum out of the AI or machine learning. >> Sure. >> How are you guys looking at that data, diverse data, the sharing? Cause in security sharing's good too, right? >> Sure, sure, sure. >> What's your thoughts on sharing data? >> I mean sharing data across our institutions, which we have great relationships with, in New York is very fluid at New York Presbyterian. We're a large healthcare conglomerate with a lot of disparate hospitals that came as a result of partnership and acquisition. They don't all use the same electronic health record system. I think right now we have seven in play and we're converging down to one. But that's a lot of data sharing that we have to focus on between seven different HR's. A patient could move from one institution to the next for a specialty procedure, and you got to make sure that their data goes with them. >> Yeah. >> So I think we're pretty, we're pretty decent at sharing the data when it needs to be shared. It's the other part of your question about artificial intelligence, really I go back to like dedication analytics. A large part of the medication analytics platform that we designed does a lot of anomaly detections, anomaly detection on diversion. So if we see that, let's say you're, you know, a physician and you do knee surgeries. I'm just making this up. I am not a clinician, so we're going to hear a lot of stupidity here, but bare with me. So you do knee surgeries, and you do knee surgeries once a day, every day, Monday through Friday, right? And after that knee surgery, which you do every day in cyclical form, you prescribe two thousand milligrams of Vicodin. That's your standard. And doctors, you know, they're humans. Humans are built on patterns. That's your pattern. Two thousand milligrams. That's worked for you; that's what you prescribe. But all of the sudden on Saturday, a day that you've never done a knee surgery in your life for the last twenty years, you all of a sudden perform a very invasive knee surgery procedure that apparently had a lot of complications because the duration of the procedure was way outside the bounds of all the other procedures. And if you're kind of a math geek right now you're probably thinking, "I see where he's going with this." >> Interviewer: Yeah. >> Because you just become an anomaly. And then maybe you prescribe ten thousand milligrams of Vicodin on that day. A procedure outside of your schedule with a prescription history that we've never seen before, that's the beauty of funneling this data into Splunk's ML Toolkit. And then visualizing that. I love the 3D visualization, right? Because anybody can see like, "Okay, all this stuff, the school of phish here is safe, but these I've got to focus on." >> Interviewer: Yeah. >> Right? And so we put that into the ML Toolkit and then we can see, "Okay, Dr. X.." We have ten thousand, a little over ten thousand physicians across New York Presbyterian. Doctor X right over here, that does not look like a normal prescriptive scenario as the rest of their baseline. And we can tweak this and we can change precision and we can change accuracy. We can move all this stuff around and say, "Well, let's just look on medical record number, Let's just focus on procedure type, Let's focus on campus location. What did they prescribe from a different campus?" That's anomalous. So that is huge for us, using the ML Toolkit to look at those anomalies and then drive the privacy team, the risk teams, the pharmacy analytics teams to say, "Oh, I need to go investigate." >> So, that's a lot of heavy lifting for ya? Let you guys look at data that you need to look at. >> Absolutely. >> Give ya a (mumbles). Final question, Splunk, in general, you're happy with these guys? Obviously, they do a big part of your data. What should people know about Splunk 2019, this year? And are you happy with them? >> Oh, I mean Splunk has been a great partner to New York Presbyterian. We've done so much incredible development work with them, and really, what I like to talk about is Splunk for healthcare. You know, we've created, we saw some really important problems in our space, in this article. But, we're looking, we're leaning really far forward into things like risk based analysis, peri-op services. We've got a microbial stewardship program, that we're looking at developing into Splunk, so we can watch that. That's a huge, I wouldn't say as big of a crisis as the opioid epidemic, but an equally important crisis to medical professionals across this country. And, these are all solvable problems, this is just data. Right? These are just events that happen in different systems. If we can get that into Splunk, we can cease the archaic practice of looking at spreadsheets, and look up tables and people spending days to find one thing to investigate. Splunk's been a great partner to us. The tool it has been fantastic in helping us in our journey to provide best in-class patient care. >> Well, congratulations, John Frushour, Deputy Chief Information Security Officer, New York Presbyterian. Thanks for that insight. >> You're welcome. >> Great (mumbles) healthcare and your challenge and your opportunity. >> Congratulations for the award winner Data to Everything award winner, got to get that slogan. Get used to that, it's two everything. Getting things done, he's a doer. I'm John Furrier, here on theCube doing the Cube action all day for three days. We're on day two, we'll be back with more coverage, after this short break. (upbeat music)

(techno music) >> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts everybody, we're here with theCUBE at the MIT Chief Data Officer Information Quality Conference. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Paul Gillin. Susan Wilson is here, she's the vice president of data governance and she's the leader at Informatica. Blake Anders is the corporate vice president of data governance at New York Life. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So, Susan, interesting title; VP, data governance leader, Informatica. So, what are you leading at Informatica? >> We're helping our customers realize their business outcomes and objectives. Prior to joining Informatica about 7 years ago, I was actually a customer myself, and so often times I'm working with our customers to understand where they are, where they going, and how to best help them; because we recognize data governance is more than just a tool, it's a capability that represents people, the processes, the culture, as well as the technology. >> Yeah so you've walked the walk, and you can empathize with what your customers are going through. And Blake, your role, as the corporate VP, but more specifically the data governance lead. >> Right, so I lead the data governance capabilities and execution group at New York Life. We're focused on providing skills and tools that enable government's activities across the enterprise at the company. >> How long has that function been in place? >> We've been in place for about two and half years now. >> So, I don't know if you guys heard Mark Ramsey this morning, the key-note, but basically he said, okay, we started with enterprise data warehouse, we went to master data management, then we kind of did this top-down enterprise data model; that all failed. So we said, all right, let's pump the governance. Here you go guys, you fix our corporate data problem. Now, right tool for the right job but, and so, we were sort of joking, did data governance fail? No, you always have to have data governance. It's like brushing your teeth. But so, like I said, I don't know if you heard that, but what are your thoughts on that sort of evolution that he described? As sort of, failures of things like EDW to live up to expectations and then, okay guys over to you. Is that a common theme? >> It is a common theme, and what we're finding with many of our customers is that they had tried many of the, if you will, the methodologies around data governance, right? Around policies and structures. And we describe this as the Data 1.0 journey, which was more application-centric reporting to Data 2.0 to data warehousing. And a lot of the failed attempts, if you will, at centralizing, if you will, all of your data, to now Data 3.0, where we look at the explosion of data, the volumes of data, the number of data consumers, the expectations of the chief data officer to solve business outcomes; crushing under the scale of, I can't fit all of this into a centralized data at repository, I need something that will help me scale and to become more agile. And so, that message does resonate with us, but we're not saying data warehouses don't exist. They absolutely do for trusted data sources, but the ability to be agile and to address many of your organizations needs and to be able to service multiple consumers is top-of-mind for many of our customers. >> And the mind set from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0 has changed. From, you know, data as a liability, to now data as this massive asset. It's sort of-- >> Value, yeah. >> Yeah, and the pendulum is swung. It's almost like a see-saw. Where, and I'm not sure it's ever going to flip back, but it is to a certain extent; people are starting to realize, wow, we have to be careful about what we do with our data. But still, it's go, go, go. But, what's the experience at New York Life? I mean, you know. A company that's been around for a long time, conservative, wants to make sure risk averse, obviously. >> Right. >> But at the same time, you want to keep moving as the market moves. >> Right, and we look at data governance as really an enabler and a value-add activity. We're not a governance practice for the sake of governance. We're not there to create a lot of policies and restrictions. We're there to add value and to enable innovation in our business and really drive that execution, that efficiency. >> So how do you do that? Square that circle for me, because a lot of people think, when people think security and governance and compliance they think, oh, that stifles innovation. How do you make governance an engine of innovation? >> You provide transparency around your data. So, it's transparency around, what does the data mean? What data assets do we have? Where can I find that? Where are my most trusted sources of data? What does the quality of that data look like? So all those things together really enable your data consumers to take that information and create new value for the company. So it's really about enabling your value creators throughout the organization. >> So data is an ingredient. I can tell you where it is, I can give you some kind of rating as to the quality of that data and it's usefulness. And then you can take it and do what you need to do with it in your specific line of business. >> That's right. >> Now you said you've been at this two and half years, so what stages have you gone through since you first began the data governance initiative. >> Sure, so our first year, year and half was really focused on building the foundations, establishing the playbook for data governance and building our processes and understanding how data governance needed to be implemented to fit New York Life in the culture of the company. The last twelve months or so has really been focused on operationalizing governance. So we've got the foundations in place, now it's about implementing tools to further augment those capabilities and help assist our data stewards and give them a better skill set and a better tool set to do their jobs. >> Are you, sort of, crowdsourcing the process? I mean, you have a defined set of people who are responsible for governance, or is everyone taking a role? >> So, it is a two-pronged approach, we do have dedicated data stewards. There's approximately 15 across various lines of business throughout the company. But, we are building towards a data democratization aspect. So, we want people to be self-sufficient in finding the data that they need and understanding the data. And then, when they have questions, relying on our stewards as a network of subject matter experts who also have some authorizations to make changes and adapt the data as needed. >> Susan, one of the challenges that we see is that the chief data officers often times are not involved in some of these skunkworks AI projects. They're sort of either hidden, maybe not even hidden, but they're in the line of business, they're moving. You know, there's a mentality of move fast and break things. The challenge with AI is, if you start operationalizing AI and you're breaking things without data quality, without data governance, you can really affect lives. We've seen it. In one of these unintended consequences. I mean, Facebook is the obvious example and there are many, many others. But, are you seeing that? How are you seeing organizations dealing with that problem? >> As Blake was mentioning often times what it is about, you've got to start with transparency, and you got to start with collaborating across your lines of businesses, including the data scientists, and including in terms of what they are doing. And actually provide that level of transparency, provide a level of collaboration. And a lot of that is through the use of our technology enablers to basically go out and find where the data is and what people are using and to be able to provide a mechanism for them to collaborate in terms of, hey, how do I get access to that? I didn't realize you were the SME for that particular component. And then also, did you realize that there is a policy associated to the data that you're managing and it can't be shared externally or with certain consumer data sets. So, the objective really is around how to create a platform to ensure that any one in your organization, whether I'm in the line of business, that I don't have a technical background, or someone who does have a technical background, they can come and access and understand that information and connect with their peers. >> So you're helping them to discover the data. What do you do at that stage? >> What we do at that stage is, creating insights for anyone in the organization to understand it from an impact analysis perspective. So, for example, if I'm going to make changes, to as well as discovery. Where exactly is my information? And so we have-- >> Right. How do you help your customers discover that data? >> Through machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities of our, specifically, our data catalog, that allows us to do that. So we use such things like similarity based matching which help us to identify. It doesn't have to be named, in miscellaneous text one, it could be named in that particular column name. But, in our ability to scan and discover we can identify in that column what is potentially social security number. It might have resided over years of having this data, but you may not realize that it's still stored there. Our ability to identify that and report that out to the data stewards as well as the data analysts, as well as to the privacy individuals is critical. So, with that being said, then they can actually identify the appropriate policies that need to be adhered to, alongside with it in terms of quality, in terms of, is there something that we need to archive. So that's where we're helping our customers in that aspect. >> So you can infer from the data, the meta data, and then, with a fair degree of accuracy, categorize it and automate that. >> Exactly. We've got a customer that actually ran this and they said that, you know, we took three people, three months to actually physically tag where all this information existed across something like 7,000 critical data elements. And, basically, after the set up and the scanning procedures, within seconds we were able to get within 90% precision. Because, again, we've dealt a lot with meta data. It's core to our artificial intelligence and machine learning. And it's core to how we built out our platforms to share that meta data, to do something with that meta data. It's not just about sharing the glossary and the definition information. We also want to automate and reduce the manual burden. Because we recognize with that scale, manual documentation, manual cataloging and tagging just, >> It doesn't work. >> It doesn't work. It doesn't scale. >> Humans are bad at it. >> They're horrible at it. >> So I presume you have a chief data officer at New York Life, is that correct? >> We have a chief data and analytics officer, yes. >> Okay, and you work within that group? >> Yes, that is correct. >> Do you report it to that? >> Yes, so-- >> And that individual, yeah, describe the organization. >> So that sits in our lines of business. Originally, our data governance office sat in technology. And then, our early 2018 we actually re-orged into the business under the chief data and analytics officer when that role was formed. So we sit under that group along with a data solutions and governance team that includes several of our data stewards and also some others, some data engineer-type roles. And then, our center for data science and analytics as well that contains a lot of our data science teams in that type of work. >> So in thinking about some of these, I was describing to Susan, as these skunkworks projects, is the data team, the chief data officer's team involved in those projects or is it sort of a, go run water through the pipes, get an MVP and then you guys come in. How does that all work? >> We're working to try to centralize that function as much as we can, because we do believe there's value in the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing in those types of things. So we're trying to build those communications channels and build that network of data consumers across the organization. >> It's hard right? >> It is. >> Because the line of business wants to move fast, and you're saying, hey, we can help. And they think you're going to slow them down, but in fact, you got to make the case and show the success because you're actually not going to slow them down to terms of the ultimate outcome. I think that's the case that you're trying to make, right? >> And that's one of the things that we try to really focus on and I think that's one of the advantages to us being embedded in the business under the CDAO role, is that we can then say our objectives are your objectives. We are here to add value and to align with what you're working on. We're not trying to slow you down or hinder you, we're really trying to bring more to the table and augment what you're already trying to achieve. >> Sometimes getting that organization right means everything, as we've seen. >> Absolutely. >> That's right. >> How are you applying governance discipline to unstructured data? >> That's actually something that's a little bit further down our road map, but one of the things that we have started doing is looking at our taxonomy's for structured data and aligning those with the taxonomy's that we're using to classify unstructured data. So, that's something we're in the early stages with, so that when we get to that process of looking at more of our unstructured content, we can, we already have a good feel for there's alignment between the way that we think about and organize those concepts. >> Have you identified automation tools that can help to bring structure to that unstructured data? >> Yes, we have. And there are several tools out there that we're continuing to investigate and look at. But, that's one of the key things that we're trying to achieve through this process is bringing structure to unstructured content. >> So, the conference. First year at the conference. >> Yes. >> Kind of key take aways, things that interesting to you, learnings? >> Oh, yes, well the number of CDO's that are here and what's top of mind for them. I mean, it ranges from, how do I stand up my operating model? We just had a session just about 30 minutes ago. A lot of questions around, how do I set up my organization structure? How do I stand up my operating model so that I could be flexible? To, right, the data scientists, to the folks that are more traditional in structured and trusted data. So, still these things are top-of-mind and because they're recognizing the market is also changing too. And the growing amount of expectations, not only solving business outcomes, but also regulatory compliance, privacy is also top-of-mind for a lot of customers. In terms of, how would I get started? And what's the appropriate structure and mechanism for doing so? So we're getting a lot of those types of questions as well. So, the good thing is many of us have had years of experience in this phase and the convergence of us being able to support our customers, not only in our principles around how we implement the framework, but also the technology is really coming together very nicely. >> Anything you'd add, Blake? >> I think it's really impressive to see the level of engagement with thought leaders and decision makers in the data space. You know, as Susan mentioned, we just got out of our session and really, by the end of it, it turned into more of an open discussion. There was just this kind of back and forth between the participants. And so it's really engaging to see that level of passion from such a distinguished group of individuals who are all kind of here to share thoughts and ideas. >> Well anytime you come to a conference, it's sort of any open forum like this, you learn a lot. When you're at MIT, it's like super-charged. With the big brains. >> Exactly, you feel it when you come on the campus. >> You feel smarter when you walk out of here. >> Exactly, I know. >> Well, guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you for having us. We appreciate it, thank you. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. Paul and I will be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from MIT in Cambridge. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from New York, it's theCube, covering AWS Global Summit 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back. We're reaching towards the end of theCube's coverage of AWS Summit in New York City. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is Corey Quinn. Behind us, they're starting to roll out the beer trucks, but before we get there, we're really excited to have on the program first-time guest, Dmitry Traytel, who's the CTO of Timehop. Dmitry, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so Timehop, for our audience that's not familiar with it, I'm familiar with it on social media, is the "oh hey, here's your memory from a year ago, three years ago, five years ago." It's interesting always to know. I know I go to a lot of events, so it's like "Groundhog Day" to me. It's like, "oh hey, AWS New York City, I remember two years ago where I saw this person, this person, this person." We capture lots of videos and photos. We should probably figure out some partnership to bring some of those memories back when we do it, but >> Dmitry: Exactly. give us a little bit for those of us that might not know Timehop. Seems like there's more than just kind of the one thing. What's the company do? >> So, Timehop, the consumer product, the mobile app, is essentially a place for you to celebrate your digital memories, right? We are the nostalgia company, where you can look back on what you did on this day, and the kind of things that you posted on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera. And relive those things, share them with your friends, and also look at what's on your phone, in your local device. Stuff you haven't shared. So, the thousand photos you took of your kid at year one, you'll see a year later, and the year after that, and you get to relive those moments. >> Okay, very cool. So, boy there must be some good metadata underneath there. You talk about the content creation that goes on with most people. It's nice that in 2019, I don't really think too much about the thousands of photos that I have in my library. Boy, I know people that are pretty noisy on social media, and boy, you'd think their feed would be overwhelmed looking back on certain days, especially the guy sitting next to me. If it's a keynote day at a conference, Corey would be like, "oh boy, did I say those things?" Is it just, I get all of it, or is there some intelligence behind that? Give us a little bit of insight. What happens? >> Sure, there's definitely some intelligence behind it, a random link you might've shared out probably won't make it, but photos and videos certainly do. And any sort of text posts, tweet threads, Facebook statuses that you might've added, particularly those from 10 plus years ago, those are the most interesting ones, because people used Facebook in a very different way back then, then they do these days. Some people used it more, some less, and we try to feature especially those that have the most engagement, we try to surface those ahead of everything else. >> Yeah, I remember back in the old days of Facebook, where it was like, "Stu is," and then it was my thing there, it's like wow. The engagement that you'd have, and photos were all very different on all of these platforms before Facebook realized, "oh hey, photos are a pretty important thing there." So, you're the CTO. Bring us a little bit inside. I'm sure architecture is something you're talking about at a show like this. I have to believe AWS is a piece, if not a major piece, of what goes behind the scenes. So, bring us inside the technology a little bit. >> Absolutely. AWS is the bedrock upon which everything is built. We run over 200 instances on EC2. We're probably running about 20 different back-end services across around 15 to 20 different AWS services, and we're doing all of this with four back-end engineers. We're a very small company. One of those engineers, Mark, he's here, he spoke earlier today about how we were able to leverage AWS to essentially spin-off a whole new line of business that's not a consumer product, but a B2B offering for the ad industry. And that's kind of what we're announcing and talking about this week. We launched a new website about it, we have some early partners that we're working with, and this is the sort of thing that saved us as a company, and allowed us to become financially independent. Amazon was the bedrock of our ability to do that without increasing staff at all. >> So, what is the capability story that AWS unlocked as a part of that, or Cloud to the larger point. We don't necessarily need to be vendor-specific, despite the room we're sitting in. What was it that empowered for you that unlocked, I guess, the opportunity? >> There were a few things. Skill ability for one thing. We were able to go from 115, 120 instances, up to 200 very quickly when our clients needed us to, because a lot of them are larger than Timehop is, in terms of user base and access. The second one would've been global reach. We expanded from one availability zone, or rather one region, out to seven, because some of them are international, or have an international user base that requires us to be global. And then beyond that, just the breadth of services, like Elasticsearch, Kinesis Firehose. All of those things that let us connect the data from what we import from social media services, over to the user themselves, when they send push notifications or show the memories. The breadth of services that Amazon as a Cloud provider offers, means we don't have to write this stuff ourselves. We can just leverage what's already there, and we can connect all those dots, and deploy quickly. >> Yeah, the undifferentiated heavy lifting is the phrase that they're in love with to describe that. I always used to frame it slightly differently, as far as you're spending time locally, solving a global problem, where the things that the infrastructure provider can do at massive scale, it just makes sense. There's no competitive value for anyone anymore, and being able to go down to the data center, and replace a failing hard drive. So, why not make that someone who can get economies and scale out of it? And focus on >> Exactly. the way they're doing things that drive business value. But, that said, you said this awhile as well, and then the slide deck yet again today for the keynote, in the future, the only code you write is business value. And then, in a very tiny font that no one except me could read was probably in JavaScript, but that's neither here nor there. How close are we to that future, based upon what you're seeing? >> Close. I know we demonstrated the CDK, and the demonstration was in TypeScript, so we're one step away from the JavaScript world. Everything that we do, we do in Go, obviously other than some of the descriptor files that allow us to spin-off that infrastructure. But, we're incredibly close to being there, and Go is so close to the hardware itself, that I'm assuming Amazon will eventually support Go for that kind of CDK as well. I know they already do for Lambda, and that's relatively recent. I think it'll take a lot of companies a long time to get there, because there's a lot of processes than some of the larger enterprise words. We're fairly small, and we can pivot very quickly, as we've proven with the ad server called Nimbus. But, we're not that far away, at least at Timehop. >> So Dmitry, we live in the enterprise world a lot, and I have to imagine that there's some companies that would be like, "why am I going to work with this consumer social media company?" So, is being on a public Cloud, and specifically AWS, does that help give credibility behind the new services that you're offering? >> I think so. I think from a reliability and dependability standpoint, when we tell a mobile app publisher that they can trust us to run their ads for them, they know because we're on AWS that that's always going to be there. And, because we monetize for them, we end up having to depend on that reliability in order to promise them four nines above time. And, the fact that they can keep a revenue stream going at all times to keep the lights on and the doors open. >> And it's funny we're having this conversation today, when Twitter was hard down globally for an hour. So, nothing is going to be impenetrable. Nothing's going to stay up forever. I don't believe in making fun of companies for their down time, but at some point, past a certain point, it's okay. If there is a region-wide outage in AWS, for example, on that day, the internet's not going to be working super great for an awful lot of people. Depending on what your business model is, and what your use case is, maybe that's acceptable. Maybe in the case of my nonsense, the world is better off if it's not on the internet for that hour or two. But, it is a difference, I think, in the business modeling, between life-critical things, versus things that people use as entertainment. It feels like the B2B story that you're telling is somewhere in between those two ends of the spectrum. >> It certainly can be. One of the reasons we did go global is to prevent that sort of thing from happening. So, everything has a backup somewhere in a different hemisphere, which is awesome. But, depending on the kind of partner that we're working with, some of them are for looking through memories like us. Some of them are for reading short stories on the internet, which you can pause on that for an hour if Amazon goes down. For some others, they might be more mission-critical, like posting portfolios or resumes, and the free version might show ads. And in that case, you might be at a job interview, and you don't need that to go down. Now, the ad side can take a minute, and I'm sure whoever's depending on it has other fires to fight at the time. But for us, we have an obligation to all of our partners to make sure that we deliver on what we promised to them, and the same way that Amazon has to us. >> So Dmitry, what learnings can you share spinning off this new line of business, moving forward, working with Amazon there. What would you be talking to your peers about as to, is there anything you would've done a little bit differently, or now that you've gone through this, that you might recommend to them? >> I would say, build in-house what you can, if nobody else is doing it better than you can. I kind of wish that we had built Nimbus a lot earlier in our life cycle, because as soon as we built it, we prototyped it over a weekend, and we learned immediately that it was going to work better than any third-party ad-tech that we could've tried. At the same time, always evaluate what you're doing against your competition. Run those A/B tests, run them properly, measure, instrument everything, and in the end, understand where your dependencies are on third-parties. And eliminate them as much as possible. Again, we're so small that we do leverage as much third-party code. The best kind of code is the code you didn't have to write in the first place. But, in certain cases, you end up bringing a lot of value to the table by writing something proprietary, and kind of the way Amazon did with AWS when they built Rotor for themselves, and started offering it to everybody else. We're doing the same with Nimbus, where we wrote this Cloud-based ad platform, and we realized that it could help us. We're now realizing that it could help everybody else in our position. >> Okay. >> So Dmitry, we want to give you the final word here. Coming to an Amazon event like this, what's it mean to Timehop? What do you personally, you and the team, get out of it? >> It means a lot. It meant a lot to my colleague Mark to be able to speak today, to share with people some of our journey. Amazon is one of the partners that we work with, even on the ad side, 'cause that is a line of business Amazon has. And, we get to announce Nimbus as a service on adsbynimbus.com, with a website we just launched this week, to share with the world that Timehop is not just the consumer Timehop product. But, we are also this ad-tech company at this point that is growing very quickly, that is hiring. And, we want to continue to work with Amazon, and all of our other partners in order to scale that business. >> All right, well Dmitry, congratulations on the launch of the new product. We know a year from now what you'll be looking back at from this event. Apologies for that, but thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you too. >> All right. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We're at the end now of our day of coverage here from AWS New York City Summit for 2019. As always, go to thecube.net for all of the content here. We're at lots of AWS shows, many of the other Cloud infrastructure, big-data, AI, IOT, you name it. If there's a show out there with great information, great content, please contact us. Thank you as always for watching theCube.